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Life and Matter 



Life and Matter 

A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 
"Riddle of the Universe' 



By 

Sir Oliver Lodge 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 
New York and London 

Gbe ftnfcfcerbocfter ©ress 

1905 



«£T N 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

NOV 21 1905 

Copyright Entry 

7t*v\/ Jr. /<?**' 

CLASS 0L XXc, No, 
COPY B. 



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Copyright, 1905 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



TEbe ftttfcfeetbocfcer press, Hew Jgotfc 



" Materialistic monism is nowadays the working hy- 
pothesis of every scientific explorer in every department, 
whatever other beliefs or denials he may, more or less 
explicitly and more or less consistently, superadd. Ma- 
terialistic monism only becomes false when put forward 
as a complete philosophy of the universe, because it 
leaves out of sight the conditions of human knowledge, 
which the special sciences may conveniently disregard, 
but which a candid philosophy cannot ignore.' ' 

* ' The legitimate materialism of the sciences simply 
means temporary and convenient abstraction from the 
cognitive conditions under which there are * facts ' or 
'objects' for us at all; it is 'dogmatic materialism' 
which is metaphysics of the bad sort. ' ' 

D. G. Ritchie. 

" Our metaphysics is really like many other sciences — 
only on the threshold of genuine knowledge : God knows 
if it will ever get further. It is not hard to see its 
weakness in much that it undertakes. Prejudice is 
often found to be the mainstay of its proofs. For this 
nothing is to blame but the ruling passion of those who 
would fain extend human knowledge. They are anxious 
to have a grand philosophy: but the desirable thing is, 
that it should also be a sound one." 

Kant. 



PREFACE 

THIS small volume is in form controversial, but 
in substance it has a more ambitious aim : it 
is intended to formulate, or doubtless rather to re- 
formulate, a certain doctrine concerning the nature 
of man and the interaction between mind and mat- 
ter. Incidentally it attempts to confute two errors 
which are rather prevalent, viz. : 

i. The notion that because material energy is 
constant in quantity, therefore its transfor- 
mations and transferences — which admittedly 
constitute terrestrial activity — are insuscept- 
ible to guidance or directing control. 
2. The idea that the specific guiding power which 
we call life M is one of the forms of material 
energy; so that, directly it relinquishes its 
connection with matter other equivalent 
forms of energy must arise to replace it. 
The book is specially intended to act as an anti- 
dote against the speculative and destructive portions 
of Professor Haeckel's interesting and widely read 



viii Preface 

work, but in other respects it may be regarded less 
as a hostile attack than as a supplement — an exten- 
sion of the more scientific portions of that work into 
higher and more fruitful regions of inquiry. 



OLIVER LODGE. 



University of Birmingham, 
October, 1905. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Monism i ~ 

II. The Law of Substance . . . .12 

III. The Development of Life 35 

IV. Memoranda for would-be Materialists 52 
V. Religion and Philosophy . . .62 

VI. Mind and Matter 87 

VII. Professor Haeckel's Conjectural 

Philosophy 109 j 

VIII. Hypothesis and Analogies Concerning 

Life . . . . . . .119 

IX. Will and Guidance 133 

X. Further Speculation as to the Origin 

and Nature of Life .... 157 



LIFE AND MATTER 



CHAPTER I 



MONISM 



IN his recent Presidential Address before the 
British Association, at Cambridge, Mr. Balfour 
rather emphasised the existence and even the desira- 
bility of a barrier between Science and Philosophy, 
which recent advances have tended to minimise, 
though never to obliterate. He appeared to hint 
that it is best for scientific men not to attempt to 
philosophise, but to restrict themselves to their 
own domain; though, on the other hand, he did 
not appear to wish similarly to limit philosophers, 
by recommending that they should keep themselves 
unacquainted with scientific facts, and ignorant of 
the theories which weld those facts together. In- 
deed, in his own person, he is an example of the 
opposite procedure, for he himself frequently takes 



2 Life and Matter 

pleasure in overlooking the boundary and making 
a wide survey of the position on its physical side — 
a' thing which it is surely very desirable for a 
philosopher to do. 

But if that process be regarded as satisfactory, it 
is surely equally permissible for a man of science 
occasionally to look over into the philosophic 
region, and to survey the territory on that side also, 
so far as his means permit. And if philosophers 
object to this procedure, it must be because they 
have found by experience that men of science who 
have once transcended or transgressed the boundary 
are apt to lose all sense of reasonable constraint, 
and to disport themselves as if they had at length 
escaped into a region free from scientific trammels 
— a region where confident assertions might be 
freely made, where speculative hypothesis might 
rank as theory, and where verification was both 
unnecessary and impossible. 

The most striking instance of a scientific man 
who on entering philosophic territory has exhibited 
signs of exhilaration and emancipation, is furnished 
by the case of Professor Haeckel of Jena. In an 
eloquent and popular work, entitled Das Welt- 



Monism 3 

Rdthsel, The World-Problem, or The Riddle of the 
Universe, this eminent biologist has surveyed the 
whole range of existence, from the foundations of 
physics to the comparison of religions, from the 
facts of anatomy to the freedom of the will, from 
the vitality of cells to the attributes of God ; treat- 
ing these subjects with wide though by no means 
superhuman knowledge, and with considerable 
critical and literary ability. This work, through 
the medium of a really excellent translation by Mr. 
McCabe, and under the auspices of the Rationalist 
Press Association, has obtained a wide circulation 
in England, being purchasable for sixpence at 
any bookstall; where one often finds it accom- 
panied by another still more popular and equally 
cheap treatise by the same author, a digest or sum- 
mary of the religious aspect of his scientific philo- 
sophy, under the title The Confession of Faith of a 
Man of Science. 

Professor Haeckel's credentials, as a learned 
biologist who introduced Darwinism into Germany, 
doubtless stand high; and it is a great tribute to 
his literary ability that a fairly abstruse work on so 
comprehensive a subject should have obtained a 



4 Life and Matter 

wide notoriety, and have been welcomed by masses 
of thinking readers, especially by many among the 
skilled artisans, in England. 

From several points of view, this diffusion of 
interest is most satisfactory, since the spread of 
thought on serious topics is greatly to be welcomed. 
Moreover, there is a vast mass of information in 
these writings which must be new to the majority 
of the inhabitants of Great Britain. There is also a 
great deal of criticism which should arouse profess- 
ors of dogmatic theology and exponents of practi- 
cal religion to a keener sense of their opportunities 
and responsibility. A view of their position from 
outside, by an able and unsparing critic, cannot but 
be illuminating and helpful, however unpleasant. 

Moreover, the comprehensive survey of existence 
which can be taken by a modern man of science is 
almost sure to be interesting and instructive when, 
with the necessary restrictions and expansions, it is 
properly interpreted; and if it be found that the 
helpful portions are unhappily accompanied by 
overconfident negations and supercilious denials of 
facts at present outside the range of orthodox 
science, these natural blemishes must be discounted 



Monism 5 

and estimated at their proper worth ; for it would be 
foolish to imagine that even a diligent student of 
Nature has special access to the kind of truths which 
have been hidden from the nominally "wise and 
prudent* ' of all time. So far as Professor Haeckers 
writings are read by the thoroughly educated and 
well-informed, they can do nothing but good. They 
may not, indeed, convey anything particularly new, 
but they furnish an interesting study in scientific 
history and mental development. So far, however, 
as they are read by unbalanced and uncultured 
persons, with no sense of proportion and but little 
critical faculty, they may do harm, unless accom- 
panied by a suitable qualification or antidote: 
especially an antidote against the bigotry of 
their somewhat hasty and scornful destructive 
portions. 

To the intelligent artisan or other hard-headed 
reader who considers that Christian faith is under- 
mined, and the whole religious edifice upset, by 
the scientific philosophy advocated by Professor 
Haeckel under the name " Monism/ ' I would say, 
paraphrasing a sentence of Mr. Ruskin's in a pre- 
face to Sesame and Lilies : Do not think it likely 



6 Life and Matter 

that you hold in your hands a treatise in which the 
ultimate and final verity of the universe is at length 
beautifully proclaimed, and in which pure truth has 
been sifted from the errors of all preceding ages. 
Do not think it, friend : it is not so. 

For what is this same "Monism "? 

Professor Haeckel writes almost as if it were a 
recent invention, but in truth, there have been many 
versions of it, and in one form or another, the idea is 
quite old, older than Plato, as old as Parmenides. 

The name " Monism" should apply to any philo- 
sophic system which assumes and attempts to 
formulate the essential simplicity and\oneness\oi all 
the apparent diversity of sensual impression and 
consciousness, any system which seeks to exhibit 
all the complexities of existence, both material and 
mental-— the whole of phenomena, both objective 
and subjective — as modes of manifestation of one 
fundamental reality. 

According to the assumed nature of that reality, 
different brands of monistic theory exist : 

I. There is the hypothesis that everything is an 
aspect of some unknown absolute Reality, which 
itself, in its real nature, is far beyond our appre- 



Monism 7 

hension or conception. And within the broad area 
thus suggested may be grouped such utterly differ- 
ent universe-conceptions as that of Herbert Spencer 
and that of Spinoza. 

2. According to another system, the fundamental 
reality is psychical, is consciousness, let us say, or 
mind ; and the material world has only the reality 
appropriate to a consistent set of ideas. Here we 
find again several varieties, ranging from Bishop 
Berkeley and presumably Hegel, on the one hand, 
to William James — -who, in so far as he is a monist 
at all, may I suppose be called an empirical idealist 
— and solipsists such as Mach and Karl Pearson, on 
the other. 

3. A third system, or group of systems, has been 
in vogue among some physicists of an earlier day, 
and among some biologists now, viz., that mind, 
thought, consciousness, are all by-products, phan- 
tasmagoria, epiphenomena, developments, and de- 
corations, as it were, of the one fundamental 
all-embracing reality, which some may call " mat- 
ter/ ' some "energy," and some "substance." In 
this category we find Tyndall — at any rate the 
Tyndall of "the Belfast address" — and here con- 



8 Life and Matter 

sistently do we find Haeckel, together with several 
other biologists. 

This last system of Monism, though not now 
in favour with philosophers, is the most militant 
variety of all; and accordingly, it has in some 
quarters managed to obtain, and it certainly seems 
anxious to obtain, a monopoly of the name. 

But the monopoly should not be granted. The 
name Materialism is quite convenient for it, just as 
Idealism is for the opposing system ; and if either 
of these titles is objected to by the upholders of 
either system, as apparently too thorough-going 
and exclusive, whereas only a tendency in one or 
other direction is to be indicated, then the longer 
but more descriptive titles of Idealistic-monism and 
Materialistic-monism respectively should be em- 
ployed. But neither of these compromises seems 
necessary to connote the position of Professor 
Haeckel. 

The truth is that all philosophy aims at being 
monistic ; it is bound to aim at unification, however 
difficult of attainment ; and a philosopher who 
abandoned the quest, and contented himself with a 
permanent antinomy — a universe compounded of 



Monism 9 

two or more irreconcilable and entirely disparate 
and disconnected agencies — would be held to be 
throwing up his brief as a philosopher and taking 
refuge in a kind of permanent Manichaeism, which 
experience has shown to be an untenable and ultim- 
ately unthinkable position. 

An attempt at Monism is therefore common to 
all philosophers, whether professional or amateur; 
and the only question at issue is what sort of Mon- 
ism are you aiming at, what sort of solution of the 
universe have you to offer, what can you hold out 
to us as a simple satisfactory comprehensive scheme 
of existence? 

In order to estimate the value of Professor 
Haeckel's scheme of the universe, it is not neces- 
sary to appeal to philosophers: it is sufficient to 
meet him on scientific ground, and to show that in 
his effort to simplify and unify he has under- 
estimated some classes of fact and has stretched 
scientific theory into regions of guesswork and 
hypothesis, where it loses touch with real science 
altogether. The facts which he chooses gratuitously 
to deny, and the facts which he chooses vigor- 
ously to emphasise, are arbitrarily selected by him 



y 



io Life and Matter 

according as they will or will not fit into his philo- 
sophic scheme. The scheme itself is no new one, 
and almost certainly contains elements of truth. 
Some day far hence, when it is possible properly to 
formulate it, a system of Monism may be devised 
which shall contain the whole truth. At present, 
the scheme formulated by Professor Haeckel must 
to philosophers appear rudimentary and antiquated, 
while to men of science it appears gratuitous, hypo- 
thetical, in some places erroneous, and altogether 
unconvincing. 

Before everything, a philosopher should aim at 
being all-inclusive; before everything, a man of 
science should aim at being definite, clear, and ac- 
curate. An attempt at combination is an ambitious 
attempt, which may legitimately be made, but 
which it appears is hardly as yet given to man to 
make successfully. Attempts at an all-embracing 
scheme, which shall be both truly philosophic and 
truly scientific, must for the present be mistrusted, 
and the mistrust should extend especially to their 
negative side. Positive contributions, either to 
fact or to system, may be real and should be wel- 
come; but negative or destructive criticism, the 



Monism n 

eschewing and throwing away of any part of human 
experience, because it is inconsistent with a prema- 
ture and ill-considered monistic or any other system, 
should be regarded with deep suspicion ; and the 
promulgation of any such negative and destructive 
scheme, especially in association with free and easy 
dogmatism, should automatically excite mistrust 
and repulsion. 

There are things which cannot yet be fitted in as 
part of a coherent scheme of scientific knowledge — 
at present they appear like fragments of another 
order of things ; and if they are to be forced into 
the scientific framework, like portions of a " puzzle- 
map/ ' before their true place has been discovered, 
a quantity of substantial fact must be disarranged, 
dislocated, and thrown away. A premature and 
cheap Monism is therefore worse than none at all. 



CHAPTER II 

THE LAW OF SUBSTANCE 

I SHALL now endeavour to exhibit the way in 
which Professor Haeckel proceeds to expound 
his views, and for that purpose shall extract certain 
sentences from his work, The Riddle of the Universe; 
giving references to the sixpenny translation, now 
so widely circulated in England, in order that with 
ease they may be referred to in their context. To 
scientific men, the exaggeration of statement will in 
many cases be immediately obvious; but in the 
present state of general education, it will often be 
necessary to append a few comments, indicating, as 
briefly as possible, wherein the statement is in ex- 
cess of ascertained fact, however interesting as a 
guess or speculation; wherefore it must be con- 
sidered illegitimate as a weapon wherewith to attack 
other systems, so far as they too are equally en- 
titled to be considered reasonable guesses at truth. 
The central scientific doctrines upon which Pro* 

12 



The Law of Substance 13 

fessor Haeckel's philosophy is founded appear to 
be two — one physical, the other biological. The 
physical doctrine is what he calls "the Law of Sub- 
stance' ' — a kind of combination of the conservation 
of matter and the conservation of energy : a law to 
which he attaches extraordinary importance, and 
from which he draws momentous conclusions. 
Ultimately, he seems to regard this law as almost 
axiomatic, in the sense that a philosopher who has 
properly grasped it is unable to conceive the nega- 
tive. A few extracts will suffice to show the re- 
markable importance which he attaches to this law : 

"All the particular advances of physics and 
chemistry yield in theoretical importance to the 
discovery of the great law which brings them to 
one common focus, the 'law of substance/ As this 
fundamental cosmic law establishes the eternal 
persistence of matter and force, their unvarying 
constancy throughout the entire universe, it has 
become the pole-star that guides our monistic philo- 
sophy through the mighty labyrinth to a solution 
of the world-problem* ' (p. 2). 

"The uneducated member of a civilised commun- 
ity is surrounded with countless enigmas at every 
step, just as truly as the savage. Their number, 
however, decreases with every stride of civilisation 
and of science; and the monistic philosophy is 



"V 



14 Life and Matter 

ultimately confronted with but one simple and com- 
prehensive enigma— the 'problem of substance* 

(P- 6). 

"The supreme and all-pervading law of nature, 
the true and only cosmological law, is, in my opin- 
ion, the law of substance ; its discovery and estab- 
lishment is the greatest intellectual triumph of the 
nineteenth century, in the sense that all other 
known laws of nature are subordinate to it. Under 
the name of 'law of substance' we embrace two 
supreme laws of different origin and age — the older 
is the chemical law of the 'conservation of matter/ 
and the younger is the physical law of the 'con- 
servation of energy/ It will be self-evident to 
many readers, and it is acknowledged by most of 
the scientific men of the day, that these two great 
laws are essentially inseparable" (p. 75). 

"The conviction that these two great cosmic 
theorems, the chemical law of the persistence of 
matter and the physical law of the persistence of 
force, are fundamentally one, is of the utmost im- 
portance in our monistic system. The two theories 
are just as intimately united as their objects — mat- 
ter and force or energy. Indeed, this fundamental 
unity of the two laws is self-evident to many mon- 
istic scientists and philosophers, since they merely 
relate to two different aspects of one and the same 
object, the cosmos" (p. 76). 

"I proposed some time ago to call it the 'law of 
substance/ or the 'fundamental cosmic law'; it 
might also be called the 'universal law/ or the 'law 
of constancy/ or the 'axiom of the constancy of the 



The Law of Substance 15 

universe/ In the ultimate analysis, it is found to 
be a necessary consequence of the principle of 
causality.' ' 

I criticise these utterances below, and in Chapter 
IV. I also quote extracts bearing on the subject 
from Professor Huxley ; but meanwhile, Profes- 
sor Haeckel is as positive as any Posit ivist, and 
runs no risk of being accused of Solipsism : 

"Our only real and valuable knowledge is a 
knowledge of nature itself, and consists of presenta- 
tions which correspond to external things. 
These presentations we call true, and we are con- 
vinced that their content corresponds to the know- 
able aspect of things. We know that these facts are 
not imaginary, but rear' (p. 104). 

He also tends to become sentimental about the 
ultimate reality as he perceives it, and tries to con- 
struct from it a kind of religion : 

"The astonishment with which we gaze upon the 
starry heavens and the microscopic life in a drop of 
water, the awe with which we trace the marvellous 
working of energy in the motion of matter, the 
reverence with which we grasp the universal domin- 
ance of the law of substance throughout the universe 
— all these are part of our emotional life, falling 
under the heading of 'natural religion' " (p. 122). 



1 6 Life and Matter 

" Pantheism teaches that God and the world are 
one. The idea of God is identical with that of 
nature or substance. ... In pantheism, God, 
as an intra-mundane being, is everywhere identical 
with nature itself, and is operative within the world 
as 'force* or 'energy/ The latter view alone is 
compatible with our supreme law — the law of sub- 
stance. It follows necessarily that pantheism is the 
world-system of the modern scientist " (p. 102). 

"This 'godless world-system* substantially agrees 
with the monism or pantheism of the modern scien- 
tist ; it is only another expression for it, emphasising 
its negative aspect, the non-existence of any super- 
natural deity. In this sense, Schopenhauer justly 
remarks : 

" 'Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism. 
The truth of pantheism lies in its destruction of the 
dualist antithesis of God and the world, in its recog- 
nition that the world exists in virtue of its own 
inherent forces. The maxim of the pantheist, ' ' God 
and the world are one/' is merely a polite way of 
giving the Lord God his congd* " (p. 103). 

Thus we are led on, from what may be supposed 
to be a bare statement of two recent generalisations 
of science,— first of all to regard them as almost 
axiomatic or self-evident; next, to consider that 
they solve the main problem of the universe; 
and, lastly, that they suffice to replace the Deity 
Himself. 



The Law of Substance 17 

To curb these extravagant pretensions, it is only 
necessary to consider soberly what these physical 
laws really assert. 

Conservation of Energy 

Take first the conservation of energy. This 
generalisation asserts that in every complete ma- 
terial system, subject to any kind of internal activ- 
ity, the total energy of the system does not change, 
but is subject merely to transference and trans- 
formation, and can only be increased or diminished 
by passing fresh energy in or out through the walls 
of the system. So far from this being self-evident, it 
required very careful measurement and experimental 
proof to demonstrate the fact, for in common 
experience, the energy of a system left to itself 
continually to all appearance diminishes; yet it has 
been skilfully proved that when the heat and every 
other kind of product are collected and measured, 
the result can be so expressed as to show a total 
constancy, appertaining to a certain specially de- 
vised function called " energy/ ' provided we know 
and are able to account for every form into which 
the said energy can be transformed by the activity 



1 8 Life and Matter 

going on. A very important generalisation truly, 
and one which has so seized hold of the mind of the 
physicist that if in any actual example, a disap- 
pearance or a generation of energy were found, he 
would at once conclude either that he had over- 
looked some known form and thereby committed 
an error, or that some unknown form was present 
which he had not allowed for: thereby getting a 
clue which, if followed up, he would hope might 
result in a discovery. 

But the term " energy" itself, as used in definite 
sense by the physicist, rather involves a modern 
idea and is itself a generalisation. Things as dis- 
tinct from each other as light, heat, sound, rotation, 
vibration, elastic strain, gravitative separation, elec- 
tric currents, and chemical affinity, have all to be 
generalised under the same heading, in order to 
make the law true. Until "heat" was included in 
the list of energies, the statement could not be 
made ; and, a short time ago, it was sometimes dis- 
cussed whether "life" should or should not be 
included in the category of energy. I should give 
the answer decidedly No, but some might be in- 
clined to say Yes; and this is sufficient as an 



The Law of Substance 19 

example to show that the categories of energy are 
not necessarily exhausted ; that new forms may be 
discovered ; and that if new forms exist, until they 
are discovered, the law of conservation of energy as 
now stated may in some cases be strictly untrue; 
just as it would be untrue, though partially and 
usefully true, in the theory of machines, if heat 
were unknown or ignored. To jump, therefore, 
from a generalisation such as this, and to say, as 
Professor Haeckel does on page 5, that the follow- 
ing cosmological theorems have already been amply 
demonstrated, is to leap across a considerable 
chasm : 

"1. The universe, or the cosmos, is eternal, in- 
finite, and illimitable. 

"2. Its substance, with its two attributes (matter 
and energy), fills infinite space, and is in eternal 
motion. 

"3. This motion runs on through infinite time as 
an unbroken development, with a periodic change 
from life to death, from evolution to devolution. 

"4. The innumerable bodies which are scattered 
about the space-filling ether all obey the same 'law 
of substance' ; while the rotating masses slowly move 
towards their destruction and dissolution in one part 
of space, others are springing into new life and 
development in other quarters of the universe/' 



20 Life and Matter 

Most of this, though in itself probable enough, 
must, when scientifically regarded, be rated as 
guesswork, being an overpressing of known fact 
into an exaggerated and over-comprehensive form 
of statement. Let it be understood that I am not 
objecting to his speculations, but only pointing out 
that they are speculations. 

The conservation of energy is a sufficiently legiti- 
mate generalisation : we do not really doubt its con- 
servation and constancy when we admit that we are 
not yet sure of having fully and finally exhausted 
the whole category of energy. What we do grant 
is, that it may hereafter be possible to discover new 
forms; and when new forms are discovered, then 
either the definition may have to be modified, or 
else the detailed statement at present found suffi- 
cient will have to be overhauled. But, after all, this 
is not specially important: the serious mistake 
which people are apt to make concerning this law 
of energy is to imagine that it denies the possibility 
of guidance, control, or directing agency, whereas 
really it has nothing to say on these topics ; it re- 
lates to amount alone. Philosophers have been far 
too apt to jump to the conclusion that because 



The Law of Substance 21 

energy is constant, therefore no guidance is pos- 
sible, so that all psychological or other interference 
is precluded. Physicists, however, know better; 
though unfortunately Tyndall, in some papers on 
Miracles and Prayer, thoughtlessly adduced the 
conservation of energy as decisive. This question 
of "guidance' ' is one of great interest, and I em- 
phasise the subject farther on. 

Conservation of Matter 

Take next the "conservation of matter' ' — which 
means that in any operation, mechanical, physical, 
or chemical, to which matter can be subjected, its 
amount, as measured by weight, remains un- 
changed; so that the only way to increase or 
diminish the weight of substance inside a given 
enclosure, or geometrically closed boundary, is to 
pass matter in or out through the walls. 

This law has been called the sheet-anchor of 
chemistry, but it is very far from being self-evident ; 
and its statement involves the finding of a property 
of matter which experimentally shall remain un- 
changed, although nearly every other property is 



22 Life and Matter 

modified. To superficial observation, nothing is 
easier than to destroy matter. When liquid — when 
dew, for instance — evaporates, it seems to disap- 
pear and when a manuscript is burned, it is certainly 
destroyed ; but it turns out that there is something 
which may be called the vapour of water, or the 
" matter' ' of the letter, which still persists, though 
it has taken rarer form and become unrecognisable. 
Ultimately, in order to express the persistence of 
the permanent abstraction called J< matter" clearly, 
it is necessary to speak of the "ultimate atoms" of 
which it is composed, and to say that though these 
may enter into various combinations, and thereby 
display many outward forms, yet that they them- 
selves are immutable and indestructible, constant in 
number and quality and form, not subject to any 
law of evolution ; in other words, totally unaffected 
by time. 

If we ask for the evidence on which this general- 
isation is founded, we have to appeal to various 
delicate weighings, conducted chiefly for practical 
purposes by chemists, and very few of them really 
directed to ascertain whether the law is true or not. 
A few such direct experiments are now, indeed, 



The Law of Substance 23 

being conducted with the hope of finding that the 
law is not completely true; in other words, with 
the hope of finding that the weight of a body does 
depend slightly on its state of aggregation or on 
some other physical property. The question has 
even been raised whether the weight of a crystal is 
altogether independent of its aspect : the direction 
of its plane of cleavage with reference to the earth's 
radius ; also, whether the temperature of bodies has 
any influence on their weight ; but on these points it 
may be truly said that if any difference were dis- 
covered it would not be expressed by saying that 
the amount of matter was different, but simply that 
" weight' ' was not so fundamental and inalienable a 
property of matter as has been sometimes assumed; 
in which case, it is clear that there must be a more 
fundamental property to which appeal can be made 
in favour of constancy or persistency or conserva- 
tion. Now the most fundamental property of mat- 
ter known is undoubtedly " inertia"; and the law 
of conservation would therefore come to mean that 
the inertia of matter was constant, no matter what 
changes it underwent. But, then, inertia is not 
an easy property to measure, — very difficult to 



24 Life and Matter 

measure with great accuracy : it is in practice nearly 
always inferred from weight ; and in terms of inertia, 
the law of conservation of matter cannot be con- 
sidered really an experimental fact; it is, strictly 
speaking, a reasonable hypothesis, an empirical law, 
which we have never seen any reason to doubt, and 
in support of which all scientific experience may be 
adduced in favour. 

It is possible, however, to grant to Professor 
Haeckel — not positively, but for the sake of argu- 
ment, and giving him the benefit of our present 
ignorance — that it is unlikely that matter in its low- 
est denomination can by us be created or destroyed, 
For, although it is now pretty well known that 
atoms of matter are not the indestructible and im- 
mutable things they were once thought (seeing that 
although we do not know how to break them up, 
they are liable every now and then themselves to 
break up or explode, and so resolve themselves into 
simpler forms), yet it can be granted that these 
simpler forms are likewise themselves atoms, in the 
same sense, and that if they break up they will 
break up likewise into atoms ; or ultimately, it may 
be, into those corpuscles or electrons or electric 



The Law of Substance 25 

charges, of which one plausible theory conjectures 
that the atoms of matter are really composed. 

Supposing an atom thus broken up into electrons, 
its weight may possibly have disappeared. We 
simply do not know whether weight is a property 
of the grouping called an atom, or whether it be- 
longs also to the individual ingredients or corpuscles 
of that atom. There is at present no evidence. 
But whether weight has disappeared or not, it is 
quite certain, for definite though rather recondite 
theoretical reasons, that the inertia would not have 
disappeared; and accordingly it may be held, and 
must be held in our present state of knowledge, 
that the constancy of fundamental material still 
holds good, even though the atoms are resolved 
into electric charges — an amount of destruction 
never contemplated by those chemists and physicists 
who promulgated the doctrine of the conservation 
of matter. 

Electrical Theory of Matter 

But then, on the electrical theory of matter, even 
inertia is not the thoroughly constant property we 
once thought it. It is a function of velocity for one 



26 Life and Matter 

thing, and when speeds become excessive, the iner- 
tia of matter rises perceptibly in value. The fact 
that it would rise in value by a calculable amount, 
and that the rise would be perceptible when the 
speed of motion approached in value to within, say, 
a tenth of the velocity of light, was predicted 
mathematically 1 ; and now, strange to say, it has 
recently become possible to observe and actually 
\ measure the increase of inertia experimentally, and 
thus to confirm the electrical theory not only as 
qualitatively or approximately true, but as com- 
pletely and quantitatively accurate. A remarkable 
achievement all this! of quite modern times, which 
has not excited the attention it deserves — save 
among physicists. 

But even this is not all that can be said as to the 
fluctuating character of that fundamental material 
quality "inertia." It appears possible, if electrons 
approach too near each other, so as to encroach on 
each other's magnetic field as they move, that then 
their inertia may fall in value during the time they 
are contiguous. No experimental fact has yet 
suggested this at present : it is improbable that even 

1 By Mr. Oliver Heaviside and Prof. J. J. Thomson. 



The Law of Substance 27 

in the tightest combinations they ever really ap- 
proach close enough to each other to make the 
effect appreciable in the slightest degree; still, 
strictly speaking, the inertia of matter is a known 
mathematical function of the distance of electrons 
apart, compared with their size, as well as of their 
absolute speed through the ether, and hence it may 
be found to vary from either of two distinct reasons. 
Nevertheless, even this variation would not be ex- 
pressed as a failure in the conservation of matter, 
though there is now no single material property 
that can be specified as really and genuinely con- 
stant. So long as the electric centres of strain, or 
whatever they are, — so long as the electric charges 
themselves, — continue unaltered, we should prefer 
to say that at least the basis of matter was funda- 
mentally conserved. 

Further than this, however, we cannot go; and 
to say, as Professor Haeckel says, that the modern 
physicist has grown so accustomed to the conserva- 
tion of matter that he is unable to conceive the 
contrary, is simply untrue. Whatever may be the 
case in real fact, there is no question with respect 
to the possibility of conception. The electrons 



28 Life and Matter 

themselves must be explained somehow; and the 
only surmise which at present holds the field is that 
they are knots or twists or vortices, or some sort of 
either static or kinetic modification, of the ether of 
space — a small bit partitioned off, from the rest and 
individualised by reason of this identifying peculiar- 
ity. It may be that these knots cannot be untied, 
these twists undone, these vortices broken up; it 
may be that neither artificially nor spontaneously 
are they ever in the slightest degree changed. It 
may be so, but we do not know; and it is quite 
easy to conceive them broken up, the identity of 
the electron lost, its substance resolved into the 
original ether, without parts or individual proper- 
ties. If this happened within our ken, we should 
have to confess that the properties of matter were 
gone, and that hence everything that could by any 
stretch of language be called " matter" was de- 
stroyed, since no identifying property remained. 
The discovery of such an event may lie in the 
science of the future; it would be an epoch-making 
event in the history of science, but no physicist 
would be upset by it, perhaps not even surprised ; 
nor would any one have good reason to be aston- 



The Law of Substance 29 

ished if the correlative phenomenon occurred, and 
under certain conditions some knots or strains were 
some day caused in the ether, which had not been 
previously there, and so "matter," or the founda- 
tion of matter, artificially produced ; in other words, 
the destruction and the creation of matter are well 
within the range of scientific conception, and may 
be within the realm of experimental possibility. 

Persistence of the Existent 

Is there, then, no meaning in the conception 
which Professor Haeckel and others have so enthus- 
iastically formulated, and which certainly commends 
itself to every one as representing in some sense a 
genuine truth, whether it be called a "law of sub- 
stance" or whatever it be called? There does seem 
a certain plausibility in the idea, pure guess or as- 
sumption though it be, that anything which really 
and fundamentally exists, in a serious and untrivial 
and non-accidental sense, can be trusted not sud- 
denly to go out of existence and leave no trace 
behind. In other words, there seems some reason 
to suppose that anything which actually exists must 
be in some way or other perpetual; that real 



3o Life and Matter 

re«* existence is not a capricious and changing attribute: 
arbitrary collocations and accidental relations may 
and must be temporary, but there may be in each 
a fundamental substratum which, if it can be 
reached, will be found to be eternal. I develop 
this idea further in the sequel. This is, at any rate, 
what Professor Haeckel was evidently groping after, 
as many others have groped before him, and the 
nature of this fundamental persistent entity or 
entities (for we must not assume without proof that 
there is only one : there may be several, and at any 
rate, their ultimate unification may be a still further 
advanced and more transcendental problem) may 
with some appropriateness be called "the problem 
of the universe," since it is clearly the problem of 
existence. Professor Haeckel thinks he has solved 
the problem, grasped the fundamental reality, and 
found it to be matter and energy and nothing else; 
though why he chooses to consider matter and 
energy as one thing instead of two is not perfectly 
plain to me, nor, I venture to say, is it really plain 
to him. 

Making the assumption, then, that there is 
something, or that there are several things, to be 



The Law of Substance 31 

discovered, which may thus have the most funda- 
mental property, viz., persistent immutable exist- 
ence, the "problem" has resolved itself into the dis- 
covery of what these things actually are. It will not 
do to jump at some object and assume that that is it. 

A multitude of things obviously perish, thereby 
showing themselves to be trivial or accidental 
arrangements, according to our hypothesis : A 
flame is extinguished and dies ; a mountain is ulti- 
mately ground into sand by the slow influence of 
denudation ; a planet or a sun may lose its identity 
by encounter with other bodies. All these are 
temporary collocations of atoms; but it appears 
now that an atom may break up into electric 
charges, and these again may some day be found 
capable of resolving themselves into pristine ether. 
If so, then these also are temporary, and, in the ma- 
terial universe, it is the ether only which persists, 
— the ether with such states of motion or strain as 
it eternally possesses, — in which case the ether will 
have proved itself the material substratum and most 
fundamental known entity on that side. X 

But are we to conclude, therefore, that no- 
thing else exists? that the existence of one thing 



32 Life and Matter 

disproves the existence of others? The contention 
would be absurd. The category of life has not 
been touched in anything we have said so far; no 
relation has been established between life and 
energy, or between life and ether. The nature of 
life is unknown. Is life also a thing of which con- 
stancy can be asserted? When it disappears from a 
material environment is it knocked out of existence, 
or is it merely transferred to some other surround- 
ings, becoming as difficult to identify and recognise 
as are the gases of a burnt manuscript or the vapour 
of a vanished cloud? Is it a temporary trivial col- 
location associated with certain complex groupings 
of the atoms of matter, and resolved into nothing- 
ness when that grouping is interfered with? or is it 
something immaterial and itself fundamental, some- 
thing which uses these collocations of matter in 
order to display itself amid material surroundings, 
but is otherwise essentially independent of them? 
(This idea is expanded in Chapters VI. to X.) 

Professor Haeckel would answer this question 
with a contemptuous negative, and the treatment 
which he would thus give to life he would also ex- 
tend to mind and consciousness, to affection, to art, 



The Law of Substance 33 

to poetry, to religion, and all the other facts of 
experience to which in the process of evolution 
humanity has risen : I say he would answer the 
question, whether these had any real existence 
other than as a necessary concomitant of a suffi- 
ciently complex material aggregate, with a con- 
temptuous negative ; but I challenge him to say by 
what right he gives that answer. His speculation 
is that all these properties are nascent and latent in 
the material atoms themselves ; that these have the 
potentiality of life and choice and consciousness, 
which we perceive in their developed combinations. 
As a speculation this is legitimate; but the only 
answer that can by science legitimately be given at 
the present time is the answer given by Du Bois- 
Reymond, "Ignoramus ," (we do not know). 

Scientifically we do not ; and for a man of science 
to pretend, or to assert in a popular treatise, that 
we do, is essentially and seriously to mislead. (See 
Chapter VII. below.) It may even be a question 
whether the assertion of entire ignorance at the pre- 
sent time is completely appropriate; whether we 
have not some positive evidence against Professor 
Haeckel's contention. I believe that we have; and 



34 Life and Matter 

though I may acquiesce in an assertion of present 
ignorance, I am not at all willing to accept the next 
sentence of Professor du Bois-Reymond's answer, 
and to say " Ignorabimus" (we never shall know). 

The matter seems to me within the legitimate 
lines of scientific inquiry, and it is unwise to attempt 
prediction, especially negative prediction, or to at- 
tempt to close the door to the future developments 
of knowledge. 

But I am content to say for the present that from 
the point of view of strict science it is not yet pos- 
sible to give any positive answer to these questions; 
that they must await the progress of discovery. It 
becomes a question of some interest, therefore, how 
it is possible for Professor Haeckel and for others 
of his school to have arrived at the idea not only 
that a scientific answer can be given, but that 
already it has been given, and that they know dis- 
tinctly what it is. 



CHAPTER III 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIFE 

THIS leads me to the second main thesis or cen- 
tral scientific doctrine of Professor Haeckel's 
treatise, the biological one; and it is this which I 
shall now proceed to illustrate by further quota- 
tions, viz., the connection as he conceives it be- 
tween life and matter. 

His view is that life has arisen from inorganic 
matter without antecedent life. The experimental 
facts of biogenesis he discards in favour of a hypo- 
thetical and at present undiscovered kind of 
spontaneous generation. He assumes that the 
chemico-physical properties of carbon confer so 
peculiar a power on its albuminoid compounds that 
they develop into living protoplasm. He says that 
he formulated this view thirty-three years ago, and 
that no better monistic theory has arisen to replace 

35 



36 Life and Matter 

it, while to reject some form of spontaneous genera- 
tion is to admit a miracle : 

"The hypothesis of spontaneous generation and 
the allied carbon-theory (viz., that ' carbon . . . 
may be considered the chemical basis of life,* p. 2) 
are of great importance in deciding the long-stand- 
ing conflict between the teleological (dualistic) and 
the mechanical (monistic) interpretation of phenom- 
ena" (p. 91). 

But it can hardly be maintained that a " hypo- 
thesis" is able to " decide' ' any dispute. 

An unscientific reader could hardly imagine that 
the apparently detailed account given in the next 
sentence of the automatic origin of life, as it may 
have arisen on other planes, and as it must have 
arisen on this, is of the nature of hypothesis: 

"First simple monera are formed by spontaneous 
generation, and from these arise unicellular pro- 
tists. . . . From these unicellular protists 
arise, in the further course of evolution, first social 
cell-communities, and subsequently tissue-forming 
plants and animals' ' (p. 131). 

In this hypothesis of automatic origin by the 
agency of matter and energy alone, he could 
probably find many biologists to agree with him 



The Development of Life 37 

speculatively ; but] he goes further than most of 
them, for he does not limit the automatic or ma- 
terial development to animal and vegetable life 
alone: he throws automatic consciousness in, too: 

"The 'cellular theory' . . . has given us the 
first true interpretation of the physical, chemical, 
and even the psychological, processes of life" (p. i). 

"Consciousness, thought, and speculation are 
functions of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the 
brain' ' (p. 6). 

"The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is 
not, as Du Bois-Reymond and the dualistic school 
would have us believe, a completely ' transcendental' 
problem : it is, as I showed thirty-three years ago, 
a physiological problem, and as such, must be re- 
duced to the phenomena of physics and chemistry" 
(p. 65). 

Holding such a view concerning consciousness, 
in the teeth of the general philosophic opinion of 
to-day, it is natural to find that of orthodox psy- 
chology and psychologists he is contemptuous : 

"Most of our so-called 'psychologists' have little 
or no knowledge of these indispensable foundations 
of anthropology, anatomy, histology, ontogeny, 
and physiology. . . . Hence it is that most of 
the psychological literature of the day is so much 
waste-paper" (p. 34). 



38 Life and Matter 

"What we call the soul is, in my opinion, a 
natural phenomenon ; I therefore consider psycho- 
logy to be a branch of natural science — a section of 
physiology. Consequently, I must emphatically 
assert from the commencement that we have no 
methods of research for that science different from 
those for any of the others' ' (p. 32). 

In this difficult science of psychology, he evi- 
dently feels himself quite at home. He assumes 
easily and gratuitously that there is a material sub- 
stance at the root of all mental processes whatever 
— called by Clifford " mind-stuff' ' (see, however, 
Chapter IV. below), — and he then proceeds to lay 
down the law concerning ancient difficulties, as 
follows : 

"We shall give to this material basis of all psychic 
activity, without which it is inconceivable, the pro- 
visional name of 'psychoplasm.' 

"The psychic processes are subject to the su- 
preme, all-ruling law of substance ; not even in this 
province is there a single exception to this highest 
cosmological law. 

* * The dogma of ' free-will, ' another essential ele- 
ment of the dualistic psychology, is similarly ir- 
reconcilable with the universal law of substance" 

(p. 32). 

"The freedom of the will is not an object for 
critical scientific inquiry at all, for it is a pure 



The Development of Life 39 

dogma, based on an illusion, and has no real exist- 
ence* ' (p. 6). 

Nevertheless, he realises that its apparent exist- 
ence has to be accounted for somehow, and accord- 
ingly, he adopts the view that has several times 
occurred to thinkers, viz., that the nucleus of all 
the faculties enjoyed by a complete organism must 
be attributed in germ or nucleus to the cells and 
even to the atoms out of which the organism is 
built up. 

His speculation as to the formation of a conscious 
organism, and to the real meaning of its apparent 
sense of right and wrong and its apparent control 
over its own acts, runs as follows, the will being 
reduced to attraction and repulsion between the 
atoms : 

"Vogt's pyknotic theory of substance is that 
minute parts of the universal substance, the centres 
of condensation, which might be called ftyknatoms, 
correspond in general to the ultimate separate atoms 
of the kinetic theory; they differ, however, very 
considerably in that they are credited with sensation 
and inclination (or will-movement of the simplest 
form), with souls, in a certain sense, — in harmony 
with the old theory of Empedocles of the ' loves 
and hatreds of the elements/ 



40 Life and Matter 

"Moreover, these 'atoms with souls' do not float 
in empty space, but in the continuous, extremely 
attenuated, intermediate substance, which repre- 
sents the uncondensed portion of the primitive 
matter" (p. yy). 

" 'Attraction* and 'repulsion' seem to be the 
sources of will — that momentous element of the 
soul which determines the character of the indi- 
vidual' ' (p. 45). 

"The positive ponderable matter, the element 
with the feeling of like or desire, is continually 
striving to complete the process of condensation, 
and thus collecting an enormous amount oi potential 
energy; the negative imponderable matter, on the 
other hand, offers a perpetual and equal resistance 
to the further increase of its strain and of the feeling 
of dislike connected therewith, and thus gathers the 
utmost amount of actual energy. 

"I think that this pyknotic theory of substance 
will prove more acceptable to every biologist who is 
convinced of the unity of nature than the kinetic 
theory which prevails in physics to-day" (p. 78). 

In other words, he appeals to a presumed senti- 
ment of biologists against the knowledge of the 
physicist in his own sphere — a strange attitude for 
a man of science. After this, it is less surprising 
to find him ignoring the elementary axiom that 
"action and reaction are equal and opposite," L e. y 
that internal forces can have no motive power on a 



The Development of Life 4 1 

body as a whole, and making the grotesque asser- 
tion that matter is moved, not by external forces, 
but by internal likes and desires : 

"I must lay down the following theses, which are 
involved in Vogt's pyknotic theory, as indispensa- 
ble for a truly monistic view of substance, and one 
that covers the whole field of organic and inorganic 
nature : 

"i. The two fundamental forms of substance, 
ponderable matter and ether, are not dead and only 
moved by extrinsic force, but they are endowed 
with sensation and will (though, naturally, of the 
lowest grade); they experience an inclination for 
condensation, a dislike of strain; they strive after 
the one and struggle against the other' ' (p. 78). 

My desire is to criticise politely, and hence I 
refrain from characterising this sentence as a phy- 
sicist should. 

" Every shade of inclination, from complete in- 
difference to the fiercest passion, is exemplified 
in the chemical relation of the various elements 
towards each other " (p. 79). 

"On those phenomena we base our conviction 
that even the atom is not without a rudimentary 
form of sensation and will, or, as it is better ex- 
pressed, of feeling (cesthesis) and inclination {tropesis) 
— that is, a universal 'soul' of the simplest charac- 
ter' ' (p. 80). 



42 Life and Matter 

"I gave the outlines of cellular psychology in 
1866 in my paper on 'Cell-souls and Soul-cells' " 

(p. 63). 

Thus, then, in order to explain life and mind and 
consciousness by means of matter, all that is done 
is to assume that matter possesses these unex- 
plained attributes. 

What the full meaning of that may be, and 
whether there be any philosophic justification for 
any such idea, is a matter on which I will not now 
express an opinion ; but, at any rate, as it stands, 
it is not science, and its formulation gives no sort 
of conception of what life and will and conscious- 
ness really are. 

Even if it were true, it contains nothing whatever 
in the nature of explanation : it recognises the in- 
explicable, and relegates it to the atoms, where it 
seems to hope that further quest may cease. In- 
stead of tackling the difficulty where it actually 
occurs; instead of associating life, will, and con- 
sciousness with the organisms in which they are 
actually in experience found, these ideas are foisted 
into the atoms of matter; and then the properties 
which have been conferred on the atoms are denied 



The Development of Life 43 

in all essential reality to the fully developed organ- 
isms which those atoms help to compose ! 

I show later on (Chapters V. and X.) that there 
is no necessary justification for assuming that a 
phenomenon exhibited by an aggregate of particles 
must be possessed by the ingredients of which it is 
composed; on the contrary, wholly new properties 
may make their appearance simply by aggregation ; 
though I admit that such a proposition is by no 
means obvious, and that it may be a legitimate 
subject for controversy. But into that question 
our author does not enter ; and even when he has 
conferred on the atoms these astounding properties, 
he abstains from what would seem a natural de- 
velopment: for his doctrine is that our power is 
actually less than that of the atoms, — that instead 
of utilising the attractions and repulsions, or " likes 
and dislikes," of our constituent particles, and 
directing them by the aggregate of conscious will- 
power to some preconceived end, we ourselves, on 
the contrary, are dominated and controlled by them; 
so that freedom of the will is an illusion. 

Freedom being thus disposed of, immortality 
presents no difficulty ; a soul is the operation of a 



44 Life and Matter 

group of cells, and so the existence of man clearly 
begins and ends with that of his terrestrial body : 

"The most important moment in the life of every 
man, as in that of all other complex animals, is the 
moment in which he begins his individual existence 
[coalescence of sperm cell and ovum] . . . the 
existence of the personality, the independent indi- 
vidual, commences. This ontogenetic fact is 
supremely important, for the most far-reaching 
conclusions may be drawn from it. In the first 
place, we have a clear perception that man, like all 
the other complex animals, inherits all his personal 
characteristics, bodily and mental, from his parents ; 
and further, we come to the momentous conclusion 
that the new personality which arises thus can lay 
no claim to ' immortality ' ' (p. 22). 

Others besides Haeckel have held this kind of 
view at one time or another; but, unlike him, most 
of them have recanted and seen the error of their 
ways. He is, indeed, aware that several of his 
great German contemporaries have been through 
this phase of thought and come out on the other 
side, notably the physiologist Wundt, and he refers 
to them fairly and instructively thus: 

"What seems to me of special importance and 
value in Wundt's work is that he 'extends the law 



The Development of Life 45 

of the persistence of force for the first time to the 
psychic world.' 

"Thirty years afterwards, in a second edition, 
Wundt emancipated himself from the fundamental 
errors of the first, and says that he ' learned many 
years ago to consider the work a sin of his youth* ; 
it 'weighed on him as a kind of crime, from which 
he longed to free himself as soon as possible/ In 
the first, psychology is treated as a physical science, 
on the same laws as the whole of physiology, of 
which it is only a part ; thirty years afterwards, he 
finds psychology to be a spiritual science, with 
principles and objects entirely different from those 
of physical science. 

"I myself/' says Haeckel, " naturally consider the 
'youthful sin* of the young physiologist Wundt to 
be a correct knowledge of nature, and energetically 
defend it against the antagonistic view of the old 
philosopher Wundt. This entire change of philo- 
sophical principles, which we find in Wundt, as we 
found it in Kant, Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond, Carl 
Ernst Baer, and others, is very interesting" (p. 36). 

So it is : very interesting ! 

Professor Haeckel is so imbued with biological 
science that he loses his sense of proportion; and 
his enthusiasm for the work of Darwin leads him to 
attribute to it an exaggerated scope, and enables 
him to eliminate the third of the Kantian trilogy : 

"Darwin's theory of the natural origin of species 



46 Life and Matter 

at once gave us the solution of the mystic 'problem 
of creation/ the great 'question of all questions' — 
the problem of the true character and origin of man 
himself ' (p. 28). 

It is a great deal more than that patient observer 
and deep thinker, Charles Darwin, ever claimed, nor 
have his wiser disciples claimed it for him. It is 
familiar that he explained how variations once 
arisen would be clinched, if favourable in the 
struggle, by the action of heredity and survival; 
but the source or origin of the variations themselves 
he did not explain. 

Do they arise by guidance or by chance? Is 
natural selection akin to the verified and practical 
processes of artificial selection? or is it wholly alien 
to them and influenced by chance alone? The lat- 
ter view can hardly be considered a complete ex- 
planation, though it is verbally the one adopted by 
Professor Haeckel, and it is of interest to see what 
he means by chance : 

4 'Since impartial study of the evolution of the 
world teaches us that there is no definite aim and 
no special purpose to be traced in it, there seems to 
be no alternative but to leave everything to 'blind 
chance.' 



The Development of Life 47 

"One group of philosophers affirms, in accordance 
with its teleological conception, that the whole 
cosmos is an orderly system, in which every 
phenomenon has its aim and purpose; there is no 
such thing as chance. The other group, holding a 
mechanical theory, expresses itself thus: The de- 
velopment of the universe is a monistic mechanical 
process, in which we discover no aim or purpose 
whatever; what we call design in the organic world 
is a special result of biological agencies ; neither in 
the evolution of the heavenly bodies nor in that of 
the crust of our earth do we find any trace of a con- 
trolling purpose — all is the result of chance. Each 
party is right — according to its definition of chance. 
The general law of causality, taken in conjunction 
with the law of substance, teaches us that every 
phenomenon has a mechanical cause; in this sense, 
there is no such thing as chance. Yet it is not only 
lawful, but necessary, to retain the term for the 
purpose of expressing the simultaneous occurrence 
of two phenomena, which are not causally related to 
each other, but of which each has its own mechani- 
cal cause, independent of that of the other. 

"Everybody knows that chance, in this monistic 
sense, plays an important part in the life of man and 
in the universe at large. That, however, does not 
prevent us from recognising in each 'chance' event, 
as we do in the evolution of the entire cosmos, the 
universal sovereignty of nature's supreme law, the 
law of substance " (p. 97). 



48 Life and Matter 

Illegitimate Negations 

With regard to the possibility of Revelation, or 
information derived from superhuman sources, 
naturally he ridicules the idea; but, in connection 
with the mode of origin and development of life 
on this planet, he makes the following sensible and 
noteworthy admission : 

"It is very probable that these processes have 
gone on likewise on other planets, and that other 
planets have produced other types of the higher 
plants and animals, which are unknown on our earth ; 
perhaps from some higher animal stem, which is 
superior to the vertebrate in formation, higher 
beings have arisen who far transcend us earthly 
men in intelligence. ' ' 

Exactly; it is quite probable. It is, in fact, im- 
probable that man is the highest type of existence. 
But if Professor Haeckel is ready to grant that 
probability or even possibility, why does he so 
strenuously exclude the idea of revelation, i. e., the 
acquiring of imparted information from higher 
sources? Savages can certainly have "revelation" 
from civilised men. Why, then, should it be in- 
conceivable that human beings should receive in- 
formation from beings in the universe higher than 



The Development of Life 49 

themselves? It may or may not be the case that 
they do ; but there is no scientific ground for dog- 
matism on the subject, nor any reason for asserting 
the inconceivability of such a thing. 

Professor Haeckel would no doubt reply to some 
of the above criticism that he is not only a man of 
science, but also a philosopher; that he is looking 
ahead, beyond ascertained fact, and that it is his 
philosophic views which are in question rather than 
his scientific statements. To some extent, it is 
both, as has been seen; but even if the above be 
widely known — if it be generally understood that 
the most controversial portions of his work are 
mainly speculative and hypothetical, it can be left 
to its proper purpose of doing good rather than 
harm. It can only do harm by misleading : it can 
do considerable good by criticising and stimulating 
and informing ; and it is an interesting fact that a 
man so well acquainted with biology as Professor 
Haeckel is should have been so strongly impressed 
with the truth of some aspect of the philosophic 
system known as Monism. Many men of science 
have likewise been impressed with the probability, 
or possibility, of some such ultimate unification. 



50 Life and Matter 

The problem to be solved — and an Old-World 
problem indeed it is — is the range, and especially 
the nature, of the connection between mind and 
matter; or, let us say, between the material uni- 
verse on the one hand, and the vital, the mental, 
the conscious, and spiritual universe or universes, 
on the other. 

It would be extremely surprising if any attempt 
yet made had already been thoroughly successful, 
though the attack on the idealistic side appears to 
many of us physicists to be by far the most hopeful 
line of advance. An excessively wide knowledge 
of existence would seem to be demanded for the 
success of any such most ambitious attempt; but, 
though none of us may hope to achieve it, many 
may strive to make some contribution towards the 
great end ; and those who think they have such a 
contribution to make, or such a revelation entrusted 
to them, are bound to express it to the best of their 
ability, and leave it to their contemporaries and 
successors to assimilate such portions of it as are 
true, and to develop it further. From this point 
of view, Professor Haeckel is no doubt amply justi- 
fied in his writings; but, unfortunately, it appears 



The Development of Life 51 

to me that although he has been borne forward on 
the advancing wave of monistic philosophy, he has, 
in its specification, attempted such precision of 
materialistic detail, and subjected it to so narrow 
and limited a view of the totality of experience, 
that the progress of thought has left him, as well as 
his great English exemplar, Herbert Spencer, some- 
what high and dry, belated and stranded by the 
tide of opinion which has now begun to flow in 
another direction. He is, as it were, a surviving 
voice from the middle of the nineteenth century; 
he represents, in clear and eloquent fashion, opin- 
ions which then were prevalent among many leaders 
of thought — opinions which they themselves in 
many cases, and their successors still more, lived to 
outgrow; so that by this time Professor Haeckel's 
voice is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 
not as the pioneer or vanguard of an advancing 
army, but as the despairing shout of a standard* 
bearer, still bold and unflinching, but abandoned 
by the retreating ranks of his comrades as they 
march to new orders in a fresh and more idealistic 
direction. 



CHAPTER IV 

MEMORANDA FOR WOULD-BE MATERIALISTS 

THE objection which it has been found neces- 
sary to express concerning Materialism as a 
complete system is based not on its assertions, but 
on its negations. In so far as it makes positive 
assertions, embodying the results of scientific dis- 
covery and even of scientific speculation based 
thereupon, there is no fault to find with it; but 
when, on the strength of that, it sets up to be a 
philosophy of the universe —all-inclusive, therefore, 
and shutting out a number of truths otherwise 
perceived, or which appeal to other faculties, or 
which are equally true and are not really contradic- 
tory of legitimately materialistic statements— then 
it is that its insufficiency and narrowness have to be 
displayed. 

It will probably be instructive, and it may be 
sufficient, if I show that two great leaders in scien- 
tific thought (one the greatest of all men of science 

52 



Would-be Materialists 53 

who have yet lived), though well aware of much 
that could be said positively on the materialistic 
side, and very willing to admit or even to extend 
the province of science or exact knowledge to the 
uttermost, yet were very far from being philosophic 
Materialists or from imagining that other modes of 
regarding the universe were thereby excluded. 

Great leaders of thought, in fact, are not accus- 
tomed to take a narrow view of existence or to sup- 
pose that one mode of regarding it, or one set of 
formulae expressing it, can possibly be sufficient 
and complete. Even a sheet of paper has two 
sides; a terrestrial globe presents different aspects 
from different points of view ; a crystal has a vari- 
ety of facets; and the totality of existence is not 
likely to be more simple than any of these — is not 
likely to be readily expressible in any form of words, 
or to be thoroughly conceivable by any human mind. 

It may be well to remember that Sir Isaac New- 
ton was a Theist of the most pronounced and 
thorough conviction, although he had a great deal 
to do with the reduction of the major Cosmos to 
mechanics, u e. 9 with its explanation by the elabo- 
rated machinery of simple forces ; and he conceived 



54 Life and Matter 

it possible that, in the progress of science, this pro- 
cess of reduction to mechanics would continue till 
it embraced nearly all phenomena. (See extract 
below.) That, indeed, has been the effort of science 
ever since, and therein lies the legitimate basis for 
materialistic statements, though not for a material- 
istic philosophy. 

The following sound remarks concerning Newton 
are taken from Huxley's Hume, p. 246: 

"Newton demonstrated all the host of heaven to 
be but the elements of a vast mechanism, regulated 
by the same laws as those which express the falling 
of a stone to the ground. There is a passage in the 
preface to the first edition of the Principia y which 
shows that Newton was penetrated, as completely 
as Descartes, with the belief that all the phenomena 
of nature are expressible in terms of matter and 
motion : 

" ' Would that the rest of the phenomena 
of nature could be deduced by a like kind 
of reasoning from mechanical principles. 
For many circumstances lead me to suspect 
that all these phenomena may depend upon 
certain forces, in virtue of which the par- 
ticles of bodies, by causes not yet known, 
are either mutually impelled against one 
another, and cohere into regular figures, 
or repel and recede from one another; 



Would-be Materialists 55 

WHICH FORCES BEING UNKNOWN, PHILOSOPHERS 
HAVE AS YET EXPLORED NATURE IN VAIN. BUT I 
HOPE THAT, EITHER BY THIS METHOD OF PHILOSO- 
PHISING, OR BY SOME OTHER AND BETTER, THE 
PRINCIPLES HERE LAID DOWN MAY THROW SOME 
LIGHT UPON THE MATTER.'" 

Here is a full-blown anticipation of an intelligible 
exposition of the universe in terms of matter and 
force: the substantial basis of what smaller men 
call Materialism and develop into what they con- 
sider to be a materialistic philosophy. But there is 
no necessity for anything of the kind ; a systematic 
expression of facts in terms of one of their aspects 
does not exclude expression in terms of other and 
totally different aspects also. Denial of all sides 
but one is a poor kind of unification. Denial of 
this sort is the weakness and delusion of the people 
who call themselves " Christian Scientists": they 
have hold of one side of truth — and that should be 
granted them, — but they hold it in so narrow and 
insecure a fashion that, in self-defence, they think 
it safest strenuously to deny the existence of all 
other sides. In this futile enterprise, they are imi- 
tating the attitude of the philosophic Materialists, 
on the other side of the controversy. 



56 Life and Matter 

And then, again, Professor Huxley himself, who 
is commonly spoken of by half-informed people as 
if he were a philosophic Materialist, was really 
nothing of the kind; for although, like Newton, 
fully imbued with the mechanical doctrine, and, of 
course, far better informed concerning the biolog- 
ical departments of nature and the discoveries 
which in the last century have been made, and 
though he rightly regarded it as his mission to make 
the scientific point of view clear to his benighted 
contemporaries, and was full of enthusiasm for the 
facts on which Materialists take their stand, he saw 
clearly that these alone were insufficient for a phi- 
losophy. The following extracts from the Hume 
volume will show, first, that he entirely repudiated 
Materialism as a satisfactory or complete scheme of 
things ; and, secondly, that he profoundly disagreed 
with the position which now appears to be occupied 
by Professor Haeckel. Especially is he severe on 
gratuitous denials applied to provinces beyond our 
scope, saying that 

" while it is the summit of human wisdom to learn 
the limit of our faculties, it may be wise to recol- 
lect that we have no more right to make denials, 



Would-be Materialists 57 

than to put forth affirmatives, about what lies 
beyond that limit. Whether either mind or matter 
has a ' substance* or not is a problem which we are 
incompetent to discuss; and it is just as likely that 
the common notions upon the subject should be 
correct as any others. . . . 'The same prin- 
ciples which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pur- 
sued to a certain point bring men back to common 
sense' " (p. 282). 

And on p. 286 he speaks concerning " substance" 
— that substance which constitutes the foundation 
of Haeckel's philosophy — almost as if he were pur- 
posely confuting that rather fly-blown production : 

"Thus, if any man think he has reason to believe 
that the 'substance' of matter, to the existence of 
which no limit can be set either in time or space, is 
the infinite and eternal substratum of all actual and 
possible existences, which is the doctrine of philo- 
sophical materialism, as I understand it, I have no 
objection to his holding that doctrine; and I fail to 
comprehend how it can have the slightest influence 
upon any ethical or religious views he may please 
to hold. . . . 

" Moreover, the ultimate forms of existence which 
we distinguish in our little speck of the universe 
are, possibly, only two out of infinite varieties of 
existence, not only analogous to matter and analog- 
ous to mind, but of kinds which we are not com- 
petent so much as to conceive — in the midst of 



58 Life and Matter 

which, indeed, we might be set down, with no more 
notion of what was about us than the worm in a 
flower-pot, on a London balcony, has of the life of 
the great city. 

"That which I do very strongly object to is the 
habit, which a great many non-philosophical ma- 
terialists unfortunately fall into, of forgetting all 
these very obvious considerations. They talk as if 
the proof that the 'substance of matter' was the 
'substance' of all things cleared up all the mysteries 
of existence. In point of fact, it leaves them 
exactly where they were. . . . Your religious 
and ethical difficulties are just as great as mine. 
The speculative game is drawn — let us get to prac- 
tical work" (p. 286). 

And again on pp. 251 and 279: 

"It is worth any amount of trouble to . . . 
know by one's own knowledge the great truth 
. . . that the honest and rigorous following up 
of the argument which leads us to 'materialism' 
inevitably carries us beyond it" (p. 251). 

"To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the 
universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into 
matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but 
what you call matter and motion are known to us 
only as forms of consciousness ; their being is to be 
conceived or known; and the existence of a state 
of consciousness, apart from a thinking mind, is a 
contradiction in terms. 

"I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. 



Would-be Materialists 59 

And, therefore, if I were obliged to choose between 
absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should 
feel compelled to accept the latter alternative" (p. 
279). 



Let the jubilant but uninstructed and compara- 
tively ignorant amateur Materialist therefore be- 
ware, and bethink himself twice or even thrice before 
he conceives that he understands the universe and 
is competent to pour scorn upon the intuitions 
and perceptions of great men in what may be to 
him alien regions of thought and experience. 

Let him explain, if he can, what he means by his 
own identity, or the identity of any thinking or 
living being, which at different times consists of a 
totally different set of material particles. Some- 
thing there clearly is which confers personal iden- 
tity and constitutes an individual : it is a property 
characteristic of every form of life, even the hum- 
blest; but it is not yet explained or understood, 
and it is no answer to assert gratuitously that there 
is some fundamental " substance" or material basis 
on which that identity depends, any more than it 
is an explanation to say that it depends upon a 
"soul." These are all forms of words. As Hume 



60 Life and Matter 

says, quoted by Huxley with approval in the work 
already cited : 

"It is impossible to attach any definite meaning 
to the word * substance/ when employed for the 
hypothetical substratum of soul and matter. . . . 
If it be said that our personal identity requires the 
assumption of a substance which remains the same 
while the accidents of perception shift and change, 
the question arises, What is meant by personal iden- 
tity? ... A plant or an animal, in the course 
of its existence, from the condition of an egg or 
seed to the end of life, remains the same neither in 
form, nor in structure, nor in the matter of which 
it is composed: every attribute it possesses is con- 
stantly changing, and yet we say that it is always 
one and the same individual' ' (p. 194). 

And in his own preface to the Hume 'volume, 
Huxley expresses himself forcibly thus, — equally 
antagonistic, as was his wont, both to ostensible 
friend and ostensible foe, as soon as they got off 
what he considered the straight path : 

"That which it may be well for us not to forget 
is, that the first-recorded judicial murder of a scien- 
tific thinker [Socrates] was compassed and effected, 
not by a despot, nor by priests, but was brought 
about by eloquent demagogues. . . . Clear 
knowledge of what one does not know just as im- 
portant as knowing what one does know. . . « 



Would-be Materialists 61 

"The development of exact natural knowledge in 
all its vast range, from physics to history and critic- 
ism, is the consequence of the working out, in this 
province, of the resolution to 'take nothing for truth 
without clear knowledge that it is such' ; to con- 
sider all beliefs open to criticism ; to regard the 
value of authority as neither greater nor less than 
as much as it can prove itself to be worth. The 
modern spirit is not the spirit 'which always denies/ 
delighting only in destruction; still less is it that 
which builds castles in the air rather than not con- 
struct ; it is that spirit which works and will work, 
'without haste and without rest/ gathering harvest 
after harvest of truth into its barns, and devouring 
error with unquenchable fire" (p. viih). 

The harvesting of truth is a safe enough enter- 
prise, but the devouring of error is a more dan- 
gerous pastime, since flames are liable to spread 
beyond our control; and though, in a world 
overgrown with weeds and refuse, the cleansing 
influence of fire is a necessity, it would be cruel to 
apply the same agency again at a later stage, when 
a fresh young crop is springing up in the cleared 
ground. 



CHAPTER V 

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 

THE aphorism sometimes encountered, that 
" whatever properties appertain to a whole 
must essentially belong to the parts of which it is 
composed/ ' is a fallacy. A property can be pos- 
sessed by an aggregation of atoms which no atom 
possesses in the slightest degree. Those who think 
otherwise are unacquainted with mathematical laws 
other than simple proportion or some continuous 
or additive functions; they are not aware of dis- 
continuities; they are not experienced in critical 
values, above which certain conditions obtain, 
while below them there is suddenly nothing. To 
refute them, an instance must suffice: 

A meteoric stone may seem to differ from a 
planet only in size, but the difference in size in- 
volves also many other differences, notably the fact 
that the larger body can attract and hold to itself 

an atmosphere ■ — a circumstance of the utmost 

62 



Religion and Philosophy 63 

importance to the existence of life on its surface. 
In order, however, that a planet may by gravitative 
attraction control the roving atoms of gas, and 
confine their excursions to within a certain range 
of itself, it must have a very considerable mass. 

The earth is big enough to do it; the moon is 
not. By simply piling atoms or stones together 
into a mighty mass there comes a critical point 
at which an atmosphere becomes possible ; and di- 
rectly an atmosphere exists, all manner of phenom- 
ena may spring into existence, which without it 
were quite impossible. 

So, also, it may be said that a sun differs from a 
dark planet only in size; for it is just the fact of 
great size which enables its gravitative-shrinkage 
and earthquake-subsidence to generate an immense 
quantity of heat and to maintain the mass for aeons 
at an excessively high temperature, thereby fitting 
it to become the centre of light and life to a num- 
ber of worlds. The blaze of the sun is a property 
which is the outcome of its great mass. A small 
permanent sun is an impossibility. 

Wherefore, properties can be possessed by an 
aggregate or assemblage of particles which in the 



64 Life and Matter 

particles themselves did not in the slightest degree 

exist. 

If, however, we reverse the aphorism and say 


that whatever is in a part must be in the whole, we 

are on much safer ground. I do not say that it 
cannot be pressed into illegitimate extremes, but in 
one, and that the simplest, sense it is little better 
than a platitude. The fact that an apple has pips 
legitimises the assertion that an apple-tree has pips, 
and that the peculiar property of pips represents a 
faculty enjoyed by the vegetable kingdom as a 
whole ; but it would be a childish misunderstanding 
to expect to find actual pips in the trunk of a tree 
or in all vegetables. 

There is a tendency to call the argument or state- 
ment that, whatever faculty man possesses, the 
Deity must have also, by the term ' 'Anthropomor- 
phism' ' ; but it seems to me a misnomer, and to con- 
vey quite wrong ideas. The argument represented 
by "He that formed the eye, shall he not see? he 
that planted the ear, shall he not hear? " need not 
assume for a moment that God has sense organs 
akin to those of man, or that He appreciates ether- 
eal and aerial vibrations in the same sort of way. It 



Religion and Philosophy 65 

is not an assertion of similarity between God and 
man, but merely a realisation that what belongs to 
a part must be contained in the whole. It is not even 
necessarily pantheistic: it would hold equally well 
on a theistic interpretation. Regarded pantheis- 
tically, it is obvious and requires no stating, re- 
garded theistically, it is a perception that faculties 
and powers which have come into existence, and 
are actually at work in the universe, cannot have 
arisen without the knowledge and sympathy and 
full understanding of the Sustainer and Compre- 
hender of it all. Nor can functions be expected in the 
creature which transcend the power of the Creator. 

All our faculties, sensations, and emotions must 
therefore be understood, and in a sense possessed, 
in some transcendental and to us unimaginable 
form, by the Deity. 

I know that it is possible to deny His existence, 
just as it is possible to deny the existence of an 
external world or to maintain that reality is limited 
to our sensations. If the Deity has a sense of 
humour, as undoubtedly He has, He must be 
amused at the remarkable philosophising faculty 
recently developed by the creature, which on this 



66 Life and Matter 

planet has become most vigorously self-conscious 
and is in the early stages of progress towards higher 
things — a philosophising faculty so acute as to lead 
him to mistrust and throw away information con- 
veyed to him by the very instruments which have 
enabled him to become what he is ; so that, having 
become keenly alive to the truth that all we are di- 
rectly aware of is the fruit of our own sensations and 
consciousness, he proceeds to the grotesque suppo- 
sition that these sensations and consciousness may be 
all that really exists, and that the information which 
for ages our senses have conveyed to us concerning 
external things may be illusory, not only in form 
and detail and appearance, but in substantial fact. 
He must be pleased, also, with the enterprise of 
those eager philosophers who are so strenuously 
impressed with the truth of some ultimate monistic 
unification, as to be unwilling to concede the multi- 
fariousness of existence; who decline to speak of 
mind and matter, or of body and spirit, or of God 
and the world, as in any sense separate entities; 
who stigmatise as dualistic anything which does not 
manifestly and consciously strain after an ultimate 
monistic view ; and who then, as a climax, on the 



Religion and Philosophy 67 

strength of a few years' superficial experience on a 
planet, by the aid of the sense organs which they 
themselves perceive to be illusory whenever the 
actual reality of things is in contemplation, proceed 
to develop the theory that the whole has come into 
being without direct intelligence and apart from 
spiritual guidance, that it is managed so well (or so 
ill) that it is really not managed at all, that no Deity 
exists, and that it is absurd to postulate the exist- 
ence of a comprehensive and all-inclusive guiding 
Mind. 

To be able to perceive comprehensively and state 
fully not only what is, but also what is not, is a 
wonderful achievement. I do not think that such 
a power has yet been acquired by any of the sons 
of men ; nor will the semi-educated readers of this 
country be wise if they pin their faith and build 
their hopes on the utterances of any man, however 
eminent, who makes this superhuman claim. 

Now, in all charity, it must be admitted that in 
some passages Professor Haeckel puts himself under 
the ban implied by the above paragraph, inasmuch 
as he conducts a sort of free and easy attack on 
religion, especially on what he conceives to be the 



68 Life and Matter 

fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But, after 
all, it can be perceived that his attack, so far as it 
is really an attack on religion, is evidently inspired 
by his mistrust and dislike, and to some extent 
fear, of Ecclesiasticism, especially of the Ultra- 
montane movement in Germany, against which he 
says Prince Bismarck began a struggle in 1872. It is 
this kind of semi-political religion that he is really 
attacking, more than the pure essence of Christian- 
ity itself. He regards it as a bigoted system hostile 
to knowledge — which, if true, would amply justify 
an attack — and he says on page 118: 

"The great struggle between modern science and 
orthodox Christianity has become more threaten- 
ing; it has grown more dangerous for science in 
proportion as Christianity has found support in an 
increasing mental and political reaction.' ' 

This may seem an exaggerated fear; but the 
following extract from a pastoral address by the 
Bishop of Newport, which accidentally I saw re- 
ported in the Tablet, shows that the danger is not 
wholly imaginary, if unwise opinions are pressed to 
their logical practical issue : 

"If the formulas of modern science contradict 



Religion and Philosophy 69 

the science of Catholic dogma, it is the former that 
. must be altered, not the latter." 1 

1 In case it is unfair to wrench a sentence like this from its con- 
text, I quote the larger portion of that instructive report in this note: 

Extract from " The Tablet" August ^7, 1904 — An Address by the 
Bishop of Newport, 

" If the Abbe Loisy has followers within the Church, as we are 
informed he has, it cannot be doubted that the danger for Catholics 
is by no means imaginary. For Loisy teaches that the dogmatic 
definitions of the Church (on the Incarnation), although the best 
that could be given at the time and under the circumstances, are 
only a most inadequate expression of the real truth, which they 
represent merely relatively and imperfectly. These definitions, he 
says, should now be stated afresh, because the traditional formula no 
longer corresponds to the way in which the mystery is regarded by 
contemporary thought. In his view, our present knowledge of the 
universe should suggest to the Church a new examination of the 
dogma of Creation ; our knowledge of history should make her re- 
vise her ideas of revelation ; and our progress in psychology and 
moral philosophy should suggest to her to re-state her theology of 
the Incarnation. Every one can see that there is a grain of truth in 
this kind of talk. But it is, on the whole, a pestilent and dangerous 
heresy. If the formulas of modern science contradict the science of 
Catholic dogma, it is the former that must be altered, not the latter. 
If modern metaphysics are incompatible with the metaphysical terms 
and expressions adopted by councils and explained by the Catholic 
schools, then modern metaphysics must be rejected as erroneous. 
The Church does not change her Christian philosophy to suit the 
world's speculations ; she teaches the world, by her theological defi- 
nitions, what true and sound philosophy is. Whilst every effort 
should be made by Catholic apologists to smooth the way for a gen- 
uine understanding of the Church's dogmatic terminology, two things 
must never be lost sight of: first, that this terminology expresses real 
objective truth (however inadequate the expression may be to the 
full meaning, as God sees it, of any given mystery) ; and, secondly, 
that such truth is expressed in terms of sound philosophy which will 
not be given up, and which may be called the Christian philosophy." 



;o Life and Matter 

Professor Haeckel continues his criticism of Offi- 
cial Christianity in the following vein : 

"The so-called * Peace between Church and State* 
is never more than a suspension of hostilities. The 
modern Papacy, true to the despotic principles it 
has followed for the last sixteen hundred years, is de- 
termined to wield sole dominion over the credulous 
souls of men; it must demand the absolute submis- 
sion of the cultured State, which, as such, defends 
the rights of reason and science. True and endur- 
ing peace there cannot be until one of the com- 
batants lies powerless on the ground. Either the 
Church wins, and then farewell to all 'free science 
and free teaching* — then are our universities no 
better than gaols, and our colleges become cloistral 
schools; or else the modern rational State proves 
victorious — then, in the twentieth century, human 
culture, freedom, and prosperity will continue their 
progressive development until they far surpass even 
the height of the nineteenth century. 

"In order to compass these high aims, it is of the 
first importance that modern science not only shat- 
ter the false structures of superstition and sweep 
their ruins from the path, but that it also erect a 
new abode for human emotion on the ground it has 
cleared — a 'palace of reason/ in which, under the 
influence of our new monistic views, we do rever- 
ence to the real trinity of the nineteenth century — 
the trinity of 'the true, the good, and the beautiful' ' 
(p. 119). 



Religion and Philosophy 7 1 

These are the bases of religion, adopted from 
Goethe, which in Haeckel's view should entirely 
replace what he calls the Trinity of Kant, viz., 
God, Freedom, and Immortality — three ideas which 
he regards as mere superstition, or as so enveloped 
in superstition as to be worthless. 

Occasionally, however, he attacks not solely ec- 
clesiastical Christianity, — in which enterprise he is 
entirely within his rights, — but he goes further and 
abuses some of its more primitive forms and to 
some extent its practical fruits also. For instance : 

"Primitive Christianity preached the worthless- 
ness of earthly life, regarding it merely as a pre- 
paration for an eternal life beyond. Hence it 
immediately followed that all we find in the life of 
a man here below, all that is beautiful in art and 
science, in public and in private life, is of no real 
value. The true Christian must avert his eyes from 
them ; he must think only of a worthy preparation 
for the life beyond. Contempt of nature, aversion 
to all its inexhaustible charms, rejection of every 
kind of fine art, are Christian duties; and they are 
carried out to perfection when a man separates 
himself from his fellows, chastises his body, and 
spends all his time in prayers in the cloister or the 
hermit's cell. ... A Christian art is a contra- 
diction in terms'' (p. 120). 



72 Life and Matter 

I think it may, without offence, be said that if he 
means by "primitive Christianity' ' the teachings of 
Christ, he is mistaken, and has something to learn 
as to what those teachings really were. If he means 
the times of persecution under the Roman Empire, 
he could hardly expect much concentration on 
artistic pursuits or much enjoyment of terrestrial 
existence when it was liable to be violently extin- 
guished at any moment : sufficient that the early 
Church survived its struggle for existence. But if 
he is referring to mediaeval Christianity of any other 
than a debased kind, common knowledge con- 
cerning mediaeval art and architecture sufficiently 
rebuts the indictment. So much so, that one 
may almost wonder if by chance he happened to 
be thinking of Mohammedanism rather than of 
Christianity. 

But he continues, in a more practical and observ- 
ant vein : 

"Christianity has no place for that well-known 
love of animals, that sympathy with the nearly 
related and friendly mammals (dogs, horses, cattle, 
etc.) which is urged in the ethical teaching of many 
of the older religions, especially Buddhism. (Un- 
fortunately, Descartes gave some support to the 



Religion and Philosophy 73 

error in teaching that man only has a sensitive soul, 
not the animal.) Whoever has spent much time in 
the south of Europe must have often witnessed 
those frightful sufferings of animals which fill us 
friends of animals with the deepest sympathy and 
indignation. And when one expostulates with 
these brutal 'Christians* on their cruelty, the only 
answer is, with a laugh: 'But the beasts are not 
Christians* " (p. 126). 

This, if true, and I have heard it from other 
sources, does constitute a rather serious indictment 
against the form of practical Christianity under- 
stood by the ignorant classes among the Latin races. 

To return, however, to the concluding paragraph 
of the extract quoted above (on page 70) from his 
page 119: 

No one can have any objection to raise against 
the dignity and worthiness of the three great attri- 
butes which excite Professor Haeckel's, as they 
excited Goethe's, worship and admiration, viz., the 
three " goddesses," as he calls them: Truth, Good- 
ness, and Beauty; but there is no necessary com- 
petition or antagonism between these and the other 
three great conceptions which aroused the venera- 
tion of Kant: God, Freedom, and Immortality; 
nor does the upholding of the one triad mean the 



74 Life and Matter 

overthrow of the other : they may be all co-eternal 
together and co-equal. Nor is either of these 
triplets inconsistent with some reasonable view of 
what may be meant by the Christian Trinity. The 
total possibility of existence is so vast- that no 
simple formula, nor indeed any form of words, 
however complex, is likely to be able to sum it up 
and express its essence to the exclusion of all other 
modes of expression. It is a pity, therefore, that 
Professor Haeckel should think it necessary to 
decry one set of ideas in order to support another 
set. There is room for all in this large universe — 
room for everything except downright lies and 
falseness. 

Concerning Truth there is no need to speak: it 
cannot but be the breath of the nostrils of every 
genuine scientific man ; but his ideas of truth should 
be large enough to take into account possibilities 
far beyond anything of which he is at present sure, 
and he should be careful to be undogmatic and 
docile in regions of which at present he has not the 
key. 

The meaning of Goodness, the whole domain of 
ethics, and the higher possibilities of sainthood of 



Religion and Philosophy 75 

which the human spirit has shown itself capable, 
are at present outside his domain ; and if a man of 
science seeks to dogmatise concerning the emotions 
and the will, and asserts that he can reduce them 
to atomic forces and motions because he has 
learned to recognise the undoubted truth that 
atomic forces and motions must accompany them 
and constitute the machinery of their manifesta- 
tion here and now, he is exhibiting the smallness 
of his conceptions and gibbeting himself as a 
laughing-stock to future generations. 

The atmosphere and full meaning of Beauty also 
he can only dimly grasp. If he seeks to explain it 
in terms of sexual selection, or any other small con- 
ception which he has recently been able to form in 
connection with vital procedure on this planet, he 
is explaining nothing: he is merely showing how 
the perception of beauty may operate in certain 
cases; but the inner nature of beauty and the faculty 
by which it is perceived are utterly beyond him. 
He cannot but feel that the unconscious and un- 
obtrusive beauty of field and hedgerow must have 
originated in obedience to some primal instinct or 
in fulfilment of some immanent desire, some lofty 



76 Life and Matter 

need quite other than anything he recognises as 
human. 

And if a poet, witnessing the colours of a sunset, 
for instance, or the profusion of beauty with which 
snow mountains seem to fling themselves to the 
heavens in districts unpeopled and in epochs long 
before human consciousness awoke upon the earth, 
— if such a seer feels the revelation weigh upon his 
spirit with an almost sickening pressure, and is con- 
strained to ascribe this wealth and prodigality of 
beauty to the joy of the Eternal Being in His own 
existence, to an anticipation, as it were, of the 
developments which lie before the universe in which 
He is at work, and which He is slowly guiding 
towards an unimaginable perfection, — it behoves 
the man of science to put his hand upon his mouth, 
lest, in his efforts to be true, in the absence of 
knowledge, he find himself uttering, in his ignor- 
ance, words of lamentable folly or blasphemy. 

Man and Nature 

Consider our own position — it is surely worth 
considering : We are a part of this planet ; on one 
side certainly and distinctly a part of this material 



Religion and Philosophy 77 

world, a part which has become self-conscious. 
At first, we were a part which had become alive; 
a tremendous step that — introducing a number of 
powers and privileges which previously had been 
impossible, but that step introduced no respon- 
sibility ; we were no longer, indeed, urged by mere 
pressure from behind, we were guided by our 
instincts and appetites, but we still obeyed the 
strongest external motive, almost like electro- 
magnetic automata. Now, however, we have be- 
come conscious, able to look before and after, to 
learn consciously from the past, to strive strenu- 
ously towards the future; we have acquired a 
knowledge of good and evil, we can choose the one 
and reject the other, and are thus burdened with a 
sense of responsibility for our acts. We still obey 
the strongest motive, doubtless, but there is some- 
thing in ourselves which makes it a motive and 
regulates its strength. We can drift like other 
animals, and often do; but we can also obey our 
own volition. 

I would not deny the rudiments of self-conscious- 
ness, and some of what it implies, to certain domes- 
tic animals, notably the dog; but domestication 



78 Life and Matter 

itself is a result of humanity, and undoubtedl)' the 
attributes we are discussing are chiefly and almost 
solely human ; they can hardly be detected in wild 
nature. No other animal can have a full percep- 
tion of its own individuality and personality as 
separate from the rest of existence. Such ideas do 
not occur in the early periods of even human in- 
fancy : they are a later growth. Self-consciousness 
must have become prominent at a certain stage in 
the evolutionary process. 

How it all arose is a legitimate problem for 
genetic psychology, but to the plain man it is a 
puzzle; our ancestors invented legends to account 
for it — legends of apples and serpents and the like ; 
but the fact is there, however it be accounted for. 
The truth embedded in that old Genesis legend is 
deep; it is the legend of man's awakening from 
a merely animal life to consciousness of good and 
evil, no longer obeying his primal instincts in a state 
of thoughtlessness and innocency — a state in which 
deliberate vice was impossible and therefore higher 
and purposed goodness also impossible, —it was the 
introduction of a new sense into the world, the sense 
of conscience, the power of deliberate choice; the 



Religion and Philosophy 79 

power also of conscious guidance, the management 
of things and people external to himself, for pre- 
conceived ends. Man was beginning to cease to be 
merely a passenger on the planet, controlled by 
outside forces ; it is as if the reins were then for the 
first time being placed in his hands; as if he was 
allowed to begin to steer, to govern his own fate 
and destiny, and to take over some considerable 
part of the management of the world. 

The process of handing over the reins to us is 
still going on. The education of the human race is 
a long process, and we are not yet fit to be fully 
trusted with the steering gear; but the words of 
the old serpent were true enough : once open our 
eyes to the perception and discrimination of good 
and evil, once become conscious of freedom of 
choice, and sooner or later, we must inevitably ac- 
quire some of the power and responsibility of gods. 
A fall it might seem, just as a vicious man some- 
times seems degraded below the beasts, but in 
promise and potency, a rise it really was. 

The oneness between ourselves and nature is not 
a thing to be deplored ; it is a thing to rejoice at, 
when properly conceived. It awakens a kind of 



8o Life and Matter 

religious enthusiasm even in Haeckel, who clearly 
perceives but a limited aspect of it ; yet the percep- 
tion is vivid enough to cause him, this so-called 
Atheist, to close his Confession of Faith with words 
such as these : 

" 'Now, at last, it is given to the mightily advanc- 
ing human mind to have its eyes opened ; it is given 
to it to show that a true knowledge of nature 
affords full satisfaction and inexhaustible nourish- 
ment not only for its searching understanding, but 
also for its yearning spirit. 

4 'Knowledge of the true, training for the good, 
pursuit of the beautiful: these are the three great 
departments of our monism; by the harmonious 
and consistent cultivation of these we effect at 
last the truly beatific union of religion and science, 
so painfully longed after by so many to-day. The 
True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the 
three august Divine Ones before which we bow 
the knee in adoration. . . . 

"In the hope that free research and free teaching 
may always continue, I conclude my monistic Con- 
fession of Faith with the words : ' May God, the 
Spirit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, be 
with us/ 

This is clearly the utterance of a man to whose 
type I unconsciously referred in an article written 
two years ago {Hibbert Journal, January, 1903), 



Religion and Philosophy 81 

from which I now make the following appropriate 
extract : 

Looking at the loom of nature, the feeling not of 
despair, but of what has been called atheism, one 
ingredient of atheism, has arisen : atheism never 
fully realised, and wrongly so called; recently it 
has been called severe Theism, indeed; for it is 
joyful sometimes, interested and placid always, 
exultant at the strange splendour of the spectacle 
which its intellect has laid bare to contemplation, 
satisfied with the perfection of the mechanism, con- 
tent to be a part of the self-generated organism, 
and endeavouring to think that the feelings of duty, 
of earnest effort, and of faithful service, which con- 
spicuously persist in spite of all discouragement, 
are on this view intelligible as well as instinctive, 
and sure that nothing less than unrepining, unfalter- 
ing, unswerving acquiescence is worthy of our 
dignity as man. 

The above Confession of Faith, then, is very well; 
for the man himself very well, indeed, but it is not 
enough for the race. Other parts of Haeckel's 
writings show that it is not enough, and that his 
conception of what he means by Godhead is narrow 

6 



82 Life and Matter 

and limited to an extent at which instinct, reason, 
and experience alike rebel. No one can be satisfied 
with conceptions below the highest which to him 
are possible : I doubt if it is given to man to think 
out a clear and consistent system higher and nobler 
than the real truth. Our highest thoughts are 
likely to be nearest to reality : they must be stages 
in the direction of truth, else they could not have 
come to us and been recognised as highest. So, 
also, with our longings and aspirations towards 
ultimate perfection, those desires which we recog- 
nise as our noblest and best ; surely they must have 
some correspondence with the facts of existence, 
else had they been unattainable by us. Reality is 
not to be surpassed, except locally and temporarily, 
by the ideals of knowledge and goodness invented 
by a fraction of itself; and if we could grasp the 
entire scheme of things, so far from wishing to 

"shatter it to bits and then 
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire,' ' 

we should hail it as better and more satisfying than 
any of our random imaginings. The universe is in 
no way limited to our conceptions : it has a reality 
apart from them ; nevertheless, they themselves 



Religion and Philosophy 83 

constitute a part of it, and can only take a clear 
and consistent character in so far as they correspond 
with something true and real. Whatever we can 
clearly and consistently conceive, that is ipso facto 
in a sense already existent in the universe as a 
whole ; and that, or something better, we shall find 
to be a dim foreshadowing of a higher reality. 



Explanatory Note on Constructive Thought 
and Optimism 

It may be worth while to explain how it is that, 
to a physicist unsmitten with any taint of solipsism, 
a well-elaborated scheme which is consistent with 
already known facts necessarily seems to correspond, 
or have close affinity, with the truth. It is the re- 
sult of experience of a mathematical theorem con- 
cerning unique distributions. For instance, it can 
be shown that in an electric field, however com- 
plicated, any distribution of potential which satisfies 
boundary conditions and one or two other essential 
criteria must be the actual distribution ; for it has 
been rigorously proved that there cannot be two or 
more distributions which satisfy those conditions, 
hence if one is arrived at theoretically, or intuitively, 
or by any means, it must be the correct one ; and no 
further proof is required. 

So, also, in connection with analogies and work- 
ing models: although they must necessarily be 






84 Life and Matter 

imperfect, so long as they are only analogies, yet the 
making or imagining of models (not necessarily or 
usually a material model, but a conceptual model) 
is a recognised way of arriving at an understanding 
of recondite and ultra-sensual processes, occurring, 
say, in the ether or elsewhere. As an addition to 
evidence derived from such experiments as have 
been found possible, and as a supplement to the 
experience out of which, as out of a nucleus, every 
conception must grow, the mind is set to design 
and invent a self-coherent scheme which shall imitate 
as far as possible the results exhibited by nature. 
By then using this as a working hypothesis, and 
pressing it to extremes, it can be gradually amended 
until it shows no sign of discordance or failure any- 
where, and even serves as a guide to new and previ- 
ously unsuspected phenomena. When that stage is 
reached, it is provisionally accepted and tentatively 
held as a step in the direction of the truth ; though 
the mind is always kept ready to improve and 
modify and enlarge it, in accordance with the needs 
of more thorough investigation and fresh discovery. 
It was so, for instance, with Maxwell's electromag- 
netic theory of light ; and there are a multitude of 
other instances. 

In the transcendental or ultra-mundane or super- 
sensual region there is the further difficulty to be 
encountered, that we are not acquainted with any- 
thing like all the "boundary conditions, " so to 
speak; we only know our little bit of the boundary, 
and we may err egregiously in inferring or attempt- 
ing to infer the remainder. We may even make a 



Religion and Philosophy 85 

mistake as to the form of function adapted to the 
case. Nevertheless there is no better clue, and the 
human mind is impelled to do the best it can with 
the confessedly imperfect data which it finds at its 
disposal. The result, therefore, in this region, is 
no system of definite and certain truth, as in physics, 
but is either suspense of judgment altogether, or 
else a tentative scheme or working hypothesis, to 
be held undogmatically, in an attitude of constant 
receptiveness for further light, and in full readiness 
for modification in the direction of the truth. 

So far concerning the ascertainment of truth 
alone, in intangible regions of inquiry. The further 
hypothesis that such truth when found will be most 
satisfactory, or, in other words, higher and better 
than any alternative plan, — the conviction that faith 
in the exceeding grandeur of reality shall not be 
confounded, — requires further justification; and its 
grounds are not so easy to formulate. Perhaps the 
feeling is merely human and instinctive ; but it is 
existent and customary, I believe, among physicists, 
possibly among men of science in general, though 
I cannot speak for all ; and it must be based upon 
familiarity with a mass of experience in which, after 
long groping and guesswork, the truth has ulti- 
mately been discovered, and been recognised as 
"very good. It is illustrated, for instance, by the 
words in which Tyndall closes the first edition of his 
book on Sound, wherein, after explaining Helm- 
holtz's brilliant theory of Corti's organ and the 
musical mechanism of the ear, — a theory which, 
amid the difficulties of actual observation, was 



86 Life and Matter 

necessarily at first saturated with hypothesis, and 
is not even yet fully verified, — he says: 

" Within the ears of men, and without their 
knowledge or contrivance, this lute of three thou- 
sand strings has existed for ages, accepting the 
music of the outer world, and rendering it fit for 
reception by the brain. ... I do not ask you 
to consider these views as established, but only as 
probable. They present the phenomena in a con- 
nected and intelligible form ; and should they be 
doomed to displacement by a more correct or com- 
prehensive theory, it will assuredly be found that 
the wonder is not diminished by the substitution of 
the truth.' ' 



CHAPTER VI 

MIND AND MATTER 

WHAT, then, is the probable essence of truth 
in Professor Haeckel's philosophy? for it 
is not to be supposed that the speculations of an 
eminent man are baseless, or that he has been led 
to his view of what he conceives to be the truth by 
some wholly erroneous path ; his initiative convic- 
tions are to be respected, for they are based on a 
far wider experience and knowledge of fact than is 
given to the average man ; and for the average man 
to consider it likely that there is no foundation 
whatever for the life convictions of a great special- 
ist is as foolish as to suppose it probable that they 
are certain and infallible, or that they are uncritic- 
ally to be accepted even in regions beyond those 
over which his jurisdiction extends. 

First as to the "law of substance,' ' by which he 
sets so much store; the fact which he is really, 
though indistinctly, trying to emphasise, is what I 

87 



88 Life and Matter 

have preferred to formulate as "the persistence of 
the really existent/ ' see page 29; and, with that 
modification, we can agree with Haeckel, or with 
what I take to be his inner meaning, to some 
extent. We may all fairly agree, I think, that 
whatever really and fundamentally exists must, so 
far as bare existence is concerned, be independent 
of time. It may go through many changes, and 
thus have a history; that is to say, it must have 
definite time-relations, so far as its changes are con- 
cerned ; but it can hardly be thought of as either 
going out of existence or as coming into existence 
at any given period, though it may completely 
change its form and accidents; everything basal 
must have a past and a future of some kind or 
other, though any special concatenation or arrange- 
ment may have a date of origin and of destruction. 
A crowd, for instance, is of this fugitive charac- 
ter : it assembles and it disperses ; its existence as a 
crowd is over, but its constituent elements persist ; 
and the same can be said of a planet or a sun. Yet 
for some "soul" or underlying reality even in these 
temporary accretions there is permanence of a sort : 
— Tyndall's "streak of morning cloud/ ' though it 



Mind and Matter 89 

may have "melted into infinite azure," has not 
thereby become non-existent, although as a visible 
object it has disappeared from our ken and become 
a memory only. It is true that it was a mere aggre- 
gate or accidental agglomeration — it had developed 
no self-consciousness; nothing that could be called 
personality or identity characterised it, — and so no 
individual persistence is to be expected for it; yet 
even it — low down in the scale of being as it is — 
even it has rejoined the general body of aqueous 
vapour whence, through the incarnating influence 
of night, it arose. The thing that is both was and 
shall be, and whatever does not satisfy this condi- 
tion must be an accidental or fugitive or essentially 
temporary conglomeration or assemblage, and not 
one of the fundamental entities of the universe. It 
is interesting to remember that this was one of the 
opinions strongly held by the late Professor Tait, 
who considered that persistence or conservation was 
the test or criterion of real existence. 

The question, How many fundamental entities m 
this sense there are, and what they are, is a difficult 
one. Many people, including such opposite think- 
ers as Tait and Haeckel, would say " matter" and 



90 Life and Matter 

" energy" ; though Haeckel chooses, on his own ac- 
count, to add that these two are one. Perhaps 
Professor Ostwald would agree with him there; 
though to me the meaning is vague. Physical 
science, pushed to the last resort, would probably 
reply that, within its sphere of knowledge at the 
present stage, the fundamental entities are ether 
and motion ; and that of other things at present it 
knows next to nothing. If physical science is in- 
terrogated as to the probable persistence, i. e. y the 
fundamental existence, of ** life^ or of "mind," it 
ought to reply that it does not know; if asked 
about "personality," or "souls," or "God," — 
about all of which Professor Haeckel has fully 
fledged opinions, — it would have to ask for a de- 
finition of the terms, and would speak either not at 
all or with bated breath concerning them. 

The possibility that "life" may be a real and 
basal form of existence, and therefore persistent, is 
a possibility to be borne in mind. It may at least 
serve as a clue to investigation, and some day may 
bear fruit ; at present it is no better than a working 
hypothesis. It is one that on the whole commends 
itself to me; for I conceive that though we know 



Mind and Matter 91 

of it only as a function of terrestrial matter, yet 
that it has another aspect too, and I say this be- 
cause I see it arriving and leaving — animating mat- 
ter for a time and then quitting it, just as I see dew 
appearing and disappearing on a plate. Apart from 
a solid surface, dew cannot exist as such ; and to a 
savage it might seem to spring into and to go out 
of existence — to be an exudation from the solid, 
and dependent wholly upon it ; but we happen to 
know more about it; we know that it has a per- 
manent and continuous existence in an impercept- 
ible, intangible, supersensual form, though its visible 
manifestation in the form of mist or dew is tempor- 
ary and evanescent. Perhaps it is permissible to 
trace in that elementary phenomenon some super- 
ficial analogy to an incarnation. 

The fact concerning life which lies at the root of 
Professor Haeckel's doctrine about its origin is 
that living beings have undoubtedly made their ap- 
pearance on this planet, where at one time they 
cannot be suspected of having existed. Conse- 
quently, that whatever life may be, it is something 
which can begin to interact with the atoms of ter- 
restrial matter at some period or state of aggregation 



92 Life and Matter 

or other condition of elaboration, — a condition 
which may perhaps be rather definite, if only we 
were aware of what it was. But that undoubted 
fact is quite consistent with any view as to the 
nature of "life," and even with any view as to the 
mode of its terrestrial commencement; there is 
nothing in that to say that it is a function of matter 
alone, any more than that the wind is a function of 
the leaves which dance under its influence; there is 
nothing even to contradict the notion that it sprang 
into existence suddenly at a literal word of com- 
mand. The improbability or absurdity of such a 
conception as this last, except in the symbolism of 
poetry, is extreme, and it is unthinkable by any 
educated person; but its improbability depends 
upon other considerations than biologic ones, and 
it is as repugnant to an enlightened theology as to 
any other science. 

The mode in which biological speculation as to 
the probable development of living out of dead 
matter, and the general relation of protoplasm to 
physics and chemistry, can be surmised or pro- 
visionally granted, without thereby concurring in 
any destructive criticism of other facts and experi- 



Mind and Matter 93 

ences, is explained in Chapter X. on "Life," 
farther on: and there I emphasise my agreement 
with parts of the speculative contentions of Profes- 
sor Haeckel on the positive side. 

Soul and Body 

Let us consider what are the facts scientifically 
known concerning the interaction between mind 
and matter. Fundamentally they amount to this : 
that a complex piece of matter, called the brain, is 
the organ or instrument of mind and consciousness; 
that if it be stimulated, mental activity results; that 
if it be injured or destroyed, no manifestation of 
mental activity is possible. Moreover, it is as- 
sumed, and need not be doubted, that a portion of 
brain substance is consumed, oxidised let us say, in 
every act of mentation, using that term in the 
vaguest and most general sense, and including in it 
unconscious as well as conscious operations. 

Suppose we grant all this, what then? We have 
granted that brain is the means whereby mind is 
made manifest on this material plane, it is the in- 
strument through which alone we know it, but we 
have not granted that mind is limited to its material 



94 Life and Matter 

manifestation; nor can we maintain that without 
matter the things we call mind, intelligence, con- 
sciousness, have no sort of existence. Mind may- 
be incorporate or incarnate in matter, but it may 
also transcend it ; it is through the region of ideas 
and the intervention of mind that we have become 
aware of the existence of matter. It is injudicious 
to discard our primary and fundamental awareness 
for what is, aftar all, an instinctive inference or in- 
terpretation of certain sensations. 

The realities underlying those sensations are only 
known to us by inference, but they have an inde- 
pendent existence: in their inmost nature, they 
may be quite other than they seem, and they are 
in no way dependent upon our perception of them. 
So, also, our actual personality may be something 
considerably removed from our conception of it 
based on our present terrestrial consciousness — a 
form of consciousness suited to, and developed by, 
our temporary existence here, but not necessarily 
more than a fraction of our total self. 

Take an analogy : the eye is the organ of vision ; 
by it we perceive light. Stimulate the retina in 
any way, and we are conscious of the sensation of 



Mind and Matter 95 

light; injure or destroy the eye, and vision becomes 
imperfect or impossible. If eyes did not exist, we 
should probably know nothing about light, and we 
might be tempted to say that light did not exist. 
In a sense, to a blind race, light would not exist, 
that is to say, there would be no sensation of light, 
there would be no sight ; but the underlying physi- 
cal cause of that sensation — the ripples in the ether 
— would be there all the time. And it is these 
ethereal ripples which a physicist understands by 
the term "light." It is quite conceivable that a 
race of blind physicists would be able to devise 
experimental means whereby they could make ex- 
periments on what to us is luminous radiation, just 
as we now make experiments on electric waves, for 
which we have no sense organ. It would be absurd 
for a psychologist to inform them that light did not 
exist because sight did not. The term might have 
to be reconsidered and redefined; indeed, most 
likely a polysyllabic term would be employed, as is 
unfortunately usual when a thing of which the race 
in general has no intimate knowledge requires no- 
menclature. But the thing would be there, though 
its mode of manifestation would be different; 



96 Life and Matter 

a term like " vision' ' might still be employed to 
signify our mode of perceiving and experiencing 
the agency which now manifests itself to us through 
our eyes; and plants might grow by the aid of that 
agency just as they do now. 

So, also, brain is truly the organ of mind and 
consciousness, and to a brainless race these terms, 
and most other terms, would be meaningless; but 
no one is at liberty to assert, on the strength of 
that fact, that the realities underlying our use of 
those terms have no existence apart from terrestrial 
brains. Nor can we say with any security that the 
stuff called " brain' ' is the only conceivable ma- 
chinery which they are able to utilise : though it is 
true that we know of no other. Yet it would seem 
that such a proposition must be held by a Material- 
ist, or indeed by a Monist, if that term be employed 
in its narrowest and most unphilosophic sense — a 
sense which would be better expressed by the term 
Materialistic-Monist, with a limitation of the term 
1 'matter" to the terrestrial chemical elements and 
their combinations, i. e. y to that form of substance 
to which the human race has grown accustomed — a 
sense which tends to exclude ethereal and other 



Mind and Matter 97 

generalisations and unknown possibilities such as 
would occur to a philosophic Monist of the widest 
kind. 

For that it may ultimately be discovered that 
there is some intimate and necessary connection 
between a generalised form of matter and some lofty 
variety of mind is not to be denied ; though, also, it 
cannot be asserted. It has been surmised, for in- 
stance, that just as the corpuscles and atoms of 
matter, in their intricate movements and relations, 
combine to form the brain-cell of a human being ; 
so the cosmic bodies, the planets and suns and 
other groupings of the ether, may perhaps combine 
to form something corresponding, as it were, to the 
brain-cell of some transcendent Mind. The idea is 
to be found in Newton. The thing is a mere guess, 
it is not an impossibility, and it cannot be excluded 
from a philosophic system by any negative state- 
ment based on scientific fact. In some such sense 
as that, matter and mind may be, for all we know, 
eternally and necessarily connected; they can be 
different aspects of some fundamental unity ; and a 
lofty kind of monism can be true, just as a lofty 
kind of pantheism can be true. But the miserable. 



98 Life and Matter 

degraded monism and lower pantheism, which limits 
the term "God" to that part of existence of which 
we are now aware, — sometimes, indeed, to a fraction 
only of that, — which limits the term * ' mind* ' to that 
of which we are ourselves conscious, and the term 
" matter" to the dust of the earth and the other 
visible bodies, is a system of thought appropriate, 
perhaps, to a fertile and energetic portion of the 
nineteenth century, but not likely to survive as a 
system of perennial truth. 

The term "organ" itself should have given pause 
to any one desirous of promulgating a scheme such 
as that. 

" Organ" is a name popularly given to an instru- 
ment of music. Without it, or some other instru- 
ment, no material manifestation or display of music 
is possible; it is an instrument for the incarnation 
of music — the means whereby it interacts with the 
material world and throws the air and so our ears 
into vibration ; it is the means whereby we appre- 
hend it. Injure the organ, and the music is imper- 
fect ; destroy it, and it ceases to be possible. But is 
it to be asserted, on the strength of that fact, that 
the term "music" has no significance apart from its 



Mind and Matter 99 

material manifestation? Have the ideas of Sir Ed- 
ward Elgar no reality apart from their record on 
paper and reproduction by an orchestra? It is true 
that without suitable instruments and a suitable 
sense organ we should know nothing of music, but 
it cannot be supposed that its underlying essence 
would be therefore extinct or non-existent and 
meaningless. Can there not be in the universe a 
multitude of things which matter as we know it is 
incompetent to express? Is it not the complaint of 
every genius that his material is intractable, that it 
is difficult to coerce matter as he knows it into the 
service of mind as he is conscious of it, and that his 
conceptions transcend his powers of expression? 

The connection between soul and body, or, more 
generally, between spiritual and material, has been 
illustrated by the connection between the meaning 
of a sentence and the written or spoken word con- 
veying that meaning. The writing or the speaking 
may be regarded as an incarnation of the meaning, 
a mode of stating or exhibiting its essence. As 
delivered, the sentence must have time relations; it 
has a beginning, middle, and end; it may be re- 
peated, and the same general meaning may be 



ioo Life and Matter 

expressed in other words; but the intrinsic meaning 
of the sentence itself need have no time relations, 
it may be true always, it may exist as an eternal 
"now," though it may be perceived and expressed 
by humanity with varying clearness from time to 
time. 

The soul of a thing is its underlying, permanent 
reality, that which gives it its meaning and confers 
upon it its attributes. The body is an instrument 
or mechanism for the manifestation or sensible pre- 
sentation of what else would be imperceptible. It 
is useless to ask whether a soul is immortal — a soul 
is always immortal "where a soul can be discerned " : 
the question to ask concerning any given object is 
whether it has a soul or meaning or personal under- 
lying reality at all. 

Those who think that reality is limited to its 
terrestrial manifestation doubtless have a philo- 
sophy of their own, to which they are entitled and 
to which at any rate they are welcome ; but if they 
set up to teach others that monism signifies a limita- 
tion of mind to the potentialities of matter as at 
present known; if they teach a pantheism which 
identifies God with nature in this narrow sense; if 



Mind and Matter 101 

they hold that mind and what tney call matter are 
so intimately connected that no transcendence is 
possible; that, without the cerebral hemispheres, 
consciousness and intelligence and emotion and 
love, and all the higher attributes towards which 
humanity is slowly advancing, would cease to be ; 
that the term "soul" signifies " a sum of plasma- 
movements in the ganglion cells"; and that the 
term "God" is limited to the operation of a known 
evolutionary process, and can be represented as 
"the infinite sum of all natural forces, the sum of 
all atomic forces and all ether vibrations," to quote 
Professor Haeckel {Confession of Faith, p. 78); then 
such philosophers must be content with an audience 
of uneducated persons, or, if writing as men of 
science, must hold themselves liable to be opposed 
by other men of science, who are able, at any rate 
in their own judgment, to take a wider survey of 
existence, and to perceive possibilities to which 
the said narrow and over-definite philosophers were 

blind. 

Life and Guidance 

Matter possesses energy in the form of persistent 
motion, and it is propelled by force; but neither 



102 Life and Matter 

matter nor energy possesses the power of automatic 
guidance and control, Energy has no directing 
power (this has been elaborated by Croll and others : 
see, for instance, p. 21, and a letter in Nature, vol. 
xliii., p. 434, thirteen years ago, under the heading 
4 ' Force and Determinism''). Inorganic matter is 
impelled solely by pressure from behind : it is not 
influenced by the future, nor does it follow a pre- 
conceived course nor seek a predetermined end. 

An organism animated by mind is in a totally 
different case. The intangible influences of hunger, 
of a call, of perception of something ahead, are 
then the dominant feature. An intelligent animal 
which is being pushed is in an ignominious position 
and resents it; when led, or when voluntarily obey- 
ing a call, it is in its rightful attitude. 

The essence of mind is design and purpose. 
There are some who deny that there is any design 
or purpose in the universe at all : but how can that 
be maintained when humanity itself possesses these 
attributes? (cf. p. 65). Is it not more reasonable to 
say that just as we are conscious of the power of 
guidance in ourselves, so guidance and intelligent 
control may be an element running through the 



Mind and Matter 103 

universe, and may be incorporated even in material 
things? 

A traveller who has lost his way in a mountain 
district, coming across a path, may rejoice, saying: 
"This will guide me home/' A Materialist, if he 
were consistent, would laugh such a traveller to 
scorn, saying: "What guidance or purpose can 
there be in a material object? there is no guidance 
or purpose in the universe; things are because they 
cannot be otherwise, not because of any intention 
underlying them. How can a path, which is little 
better than the absence of grass or the wearing 
down of stones, know where you live or guide you 
to any desired destination? Moreover, whatever 
knowledge or purpose the path exhibits must be in 
the path, must be a property of the atoms of which 
it is composed. To them some fraction of will, of 
power, of knowledge, and of feeling may perhaps 
be attributed, and from their aggregation some- 
thing of the same kind may perhaps be deduced. 
If the traveller can decipher that, he may utilise 
the material object to his advantage; but if he 
conceives the path to have been made with any 
teleological object or intelligent purpose, he is 



104 Life and Matter 

abandoning himself to superstition, and is as likely 
to be led by it to the edge of a precipice as any- 
where else. Let him follow his superstition at his 
peril!" 

This is not a quotation, of course: but it is a 
parable. 

Matter is the instrument and vehicle of mind; 
incarnation is the mode by which mind interacts 
with the present scheme of things, and thereby the 
element of guidance is supplied ; it can, in fact, be 
embodied in an intelligent arrangement of inert in- 
organic matter. Even a mountain path exhibits 
the property of guidance, and has direction ; it is 
an incorporation of intelligence, though itself inert. 

Direction is not a function of energy. The energy 
of sound from an organ is supplied by the blower 
of the bellows, which may be worked by a me- 
chanical engine ; but the melody and harmony, the 
sequence and co-existence of notes, are determined 
by the dominating mind of the musician : not 
necessarily of the executant alone, for the com- 
posers mind may be evoked to some extent even 
by a pianola. The music may be said to be incar- 
nate in the roll of paper which is ready to be passed 



Mind and Matter 105 

through the instrument. So also can the concep- 
tion of any artist receive material embodiment in 
his work, and if a picture or a beautiful building is 
destroyed it can be made to rise again from its 
ashes provided the painter or the architect still 
lives: in other words, his thought can receive a 
fresh incarnation; and a perception of the beautiful 
form shall hereafter, in a kindred spirit, arouse 
similar ideas. 

There is thus a truth in Materialism, but it is not 
a truth readily to be apprehended and formulated. 
Matter may become imbued with life, and full of 
vital association : something of the personality of a 
departed owner seems to cling sometimes about an 
old garment ; its curves and folds can suggest him 
vividly to our recollection. I would not too blat- 
antly assert that even a doll on which much affec- 
tion had been lavished was wholly inert and material 
in the inorganic sense. The tattered colours, of a 
regiment are sometimes thought worthy to be hung 
in a church. They are a symbol truly, but they 
may be something more. I have reason to believe 
that a trace of individuality can cling about terres- 
trial objects in a vague and almost imperceptible 



106 Life and Matter 

fashion, but to a degree sufficient to enable those 
traces to be detected by persons with suitable 
faculties. 

There is a deep truth in Materialism; and it is 
the foundation of the material parts of worship — 
sacraments and the like. It is possible to exagger- 
ate their efficacy, but it is also possible to ignore it 
too completely. The whole universe is metrical, — 
everything is a question of degree. A property 
like radio-activity or magnetism, discovered con- 
spicuously in one form of matter, turns out to be 
possessed by matter of every kind, though to very 
varying extent. 

So it would appear to be with the power pos- 
sessed by matter to incarnate and display mind. 

There are grades of incarnation : the most thor- 
ough kind is that illustrated by our bodies ; in them 
we are incarnate, but probably not even in that 
case is the incarnation complete. It is quite cred- 
ible that our whole and entire personality is never 
terrestrially manifest. 

There are grades of incarnation. Some of the 
personality of an Old Master is locked up in a 
painting; and whoever wilfully destroys a great 



Mind and Matter 107 

picture is guilty of something akin to murder, 
namely, the premature and violent separation of 
soul and body. Some of the soul of a musician 
can be occluded in a piece of manuscript, to be 
deciphered* thereafter by a perceptive mind. 

Matter is the vehicle of mind, but it is dominated 
and transcended by it. A painting is held together 
by cohesive forces among the atoms of its pigments; 
and if those forces rebelled or turned repulsive the 
picture would be disintegrated and destroyed ; yet 
those forces did not make the picture. A cathedral 
is held together by inorganic forces, and it was 
built in obedience to them, but they do not explain 
it. It may owe its existence and design to the 
thought of some one who never touched a stone, 
or even of some one who was dead before it was 
begun. In its symbolism, it represents One who 
was executed many centuries ago. Death and 
Time are far from dominant. 

Are we so sure that, when we truly attribute a 
sunset, or the moonlight rippling on a lake, to the 
chemical and physical action of material forces, — to 
the vibrations of matter and ether as we know 
them, — we have exhausted the whole truth of 



108 Life and Matter 

things? Many a thinker, brooding over the phe- 
nomena of nature, has felt that they represent the 
thoughts of a dominating, unknown Mind partially 
incarnate in it all 



CHAPTER VII 

PROFESSOR HAECKEL'S CONJECTURAL 
PHILOSOPHY 

A Reply to Mr. McCabe 

PART of the preceding, so far as it is a criticism 
of Haeckel, was given by me in the first in- 
stance as a Presidential Address to the Mem- 
bers of the Birmingham and Midland Institute; and 
the greater portion of this Address was printed in the 
Hibbert Journal for January, 1905. Mr. McCabe, 
the translator of Haeckel, thereupon took up the 
cudgels on behalf of his chief, and wrote an article 
in the following July issue, to the pages of which 
references will be given when quoting. A few ob- 
servations of mine in reply to this article emphasise 
one or two points which perhaps previously were 
not quite clear; and so this reply, from the October 
number of the If zbbert Journal, may be conveniently 
here reproduced. 

I have no fault to find with the tone of Mr. 
McCabe's criticism of my criticism of Haeckel; and 
it is satisfactory that one who has proved himself 
an enthusiastic disciple, as well as a most industrious 

109 



no Life and Matter 

and competent translator, should stand up for the 
honour and credit of a foreign master when he is 
attacked. 

But in admitting the appropriateness and the 
conciliatory tone of his article, I must not be sup- 
posed to agree with its contentions; for although 
he seeks to show that after all there is but little 
difference between myself and Haeckel, — and al- 
though in a sense that is true as regards the funda- 
mental facts of science, distinguishing the facts 
themselves from any hypothetical and interpretative 
gloss, — -yet with Haeckel's interpretations and spec- 
ulative deductions from the facts, especially with 
the mode of presentation, and the crude and un- 
balanced attacks on other fields of human activity, 
my feeling of divergence occasionally becomes 
intense. 

And it is just these superficial, and, as Mr. 
McCabe now admits, hypothetical, and as they seem 
to me rather rash, excursions into side issues, which 
have attracted the attention of the average man, 
and have succeeded in misleading the ignorant. 

If it could be universally recognised that 

"it is expressly as a hypothesis that Haeckel formu- 



Haeckel's Conjectural Philosophy 



in 



lates his conjecture as to manner of the origin of 
life" (p. 744); 

and if it could be further generally admitted that 
his authority outside biology is so weak that 

"it is mere pettiness to carp at incidental statements 
on matters on which Haeckel is known to have or to 
exercise no peculiar authority, or to labour in deter- 
mining the precise degree of evidence for the monism 
of the inorganic or the organic world' ' (p. 748), 

I should be quite content, and hope that I may 
never find it necessary to carp at these things again. 
Also I entirely agree with Mr. McCabe, though I 
have some doubt whether Professor Haeckel would 
equally agree with him, that 

w there remain the great questions whether this 
mechanical evolution of the universe needed intel- 
ligent control, and whether the mind of man stands 
out as imperishable amidst the wreck of worlds. 
These constitute the serious controversy of our 
time in the region of cosmic philosophy or science. 
These are the rocks that will divide the stream of 
higher scientific thought for long years to come. 
To many of us it seems that a concentration on 
these issues is as much to be desired as sympathy 
and mutual appreciation' ' (p. 748). 

This is excellent ; but then it is surely true that 



ii2 Life and Matter 

Professor Haeckel has taken great pains to state 
forcibly and clearly that these great questions can- 
not by him be regarded as open; in fact, Mr. 
McCabe himself says : 

"Haeckel's position, if expressed at times with 
some harshness, and not always with perfect con- 
sistency, is well enough known. He rejects the 
idea of intelligent and benevolent guidance, chiefly 
on the ground of the facts of dysteleology, and he 
fails to see any evidence for exempting the human 
mind from the general law of dissolution" (p. 748). 

Ultimately, however, he appears to have been 
driven to a singularly unphilosophic view, of which 
Mr. McCabe says : 

"It is interesting to note that in his latest work 
Haeckel regards sensation (or unconscious sentience) 
as an ultimate and irreducible attribute of substance, 
like matter (or extension) and force (or spirit)' ' (p. 

752). 

I call this unphilosophical because — omitting any 
reference here to the singular parenthetical explana- 
tions or paraphrases, for which I suppose Haeckel 
is not to be held responsible— this is simply aban- 
doning all attempt at explanation; it even closes 
the door to inquiry, and is equivalent to an attitude 



Haeckel's Conjectural Philosophy 113 

proper to any man in the street, for it virtually 
says: "Here the thing is anyhow; I cannot explain 
it." However legitimate and necessary such an 
attitude may be as an expression of our ignorance, 
we ought not to use the phrase "ultimate and irre- 
ducible," as if no one could ever explain it. 
Moreover, if it be true that 

"Haeckel does not teach — never did teach— that 
the spiritual universe is an aspect of the material 
universe, as his critic makes him say, it is his funda- 
mental and most distinctive idea that both are at- 
tributes or aspects of a deeper reality" (p. 745), 

in that case there is, indeed, but little difference 
between us. But no reader of Haeckel's Riddle 
would have anticipated that such a contention could 
be made by any devout disciple; and I wonder 
whether Mr. McCabe can adduce any passage ade- 
quate to support so estimable a position. Surely it 
is difficult to maintain it in face of quotations such 
as these : 

"The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is 
. . . a physiological problem, and as such must 
be reduced to the phenomena of physics and chem- 
istry" (p. 65)^ 

"The soul is in my opinion a natural phenom- 
enon. I therefore consider psychology a branch of 

8 



ii4 Life and Matter 

natural science — a section of physiology . . . 
we shall give to the material basis of all psychic 
activity, without which it is inconceivable, the 
provisional name of psychoplasm" (p. 32). 

Vital Energy 

The one and only point on which I think it worth 
while to express decided dissidence is to be found 
in the paragraph where Mr. McCabe makes a state- 
ment concerning what he calls " vital force," — a 
term I do not remember to have ever used in my 
life. He claims for Haeckel what is represented by 
the following extracts from his article (pp. 745, 746, 
747): 

"He does not say that life is 'knocked out of 
existence' when the material organism decays. He 
says that the vital energy no longer exists as such, 
but is resolved into the inorganic energies associated 
with the gases and relics of the decaying body. 
Thus the matter looks a little different when Sir 
Oliver comes to 'challenge him to say by what right 
he gives that answer/ He gives it on this plain 
right, that science always finds these inorganic ener- 
gies reappearing on the dissolution of life y and has 
never in a single instance found the slightest reason 
to suspect (if we make an exception for the moment 
of psychical research) that the vital force as such 
has continued to exist/' 



HaeckeFs Conjectural Philosophy 115 

The italics are mine. A little farther on he con- 
tinues : 

' ' There is no serious scientific demur to Haeckel's 
assumption of a monism of the physical world, and 
his identification of vital force with ordinary physi- 
cal and chemical forces." 

"Sir Oliver seems to admit, indeed, that the vital 
force is not in its nature distinct from physical force, 
but holds that it needs 'guidance.' " 

"On all sides we hear the echo of Professor Le 
Conte's words: 'Vital force may now be regarded 
as so much force withdrawn from the general fund 
of chemical and physical forces.' " 

Very well, then, here is no conflict on a matter of 
opinion or philosophic speculation, but divergence 
on a downright question of scientific fact (let it be 
noted that I do not wish to hold Professor Haeckel 
responsible for these utterances of his disciple : he 
must surely know better), and I wish to oppose the 
fallacy in the strongest terms. 

If it were true that vital energy turned into or 
was anyhow convertible into inorganic energy ; if it 
were true that a dead body had more inorganic 
energy than a live one; if it were true that these in- 
organic energies always or ever reappear on the dis- 
solution of life, then undoubtedly cadit qucestio ; 



n6 Life and Matter 

life would immediately be proved to be a form of 
energy, and would enter into the scheme of physics. 
But inasmuch as all this is untrue, — the direct con- 
trary of the truth,— I maintain that life is not a form 
of energy; that it is not included in our present 
physical categories; that its explanation is still to 
be sought. And I have further stated — though there 
I do not dogmatise — that it appears to me to belong 
to a separate order of existence, which interacts 
with this material frame of things, and, while there, 
exerts guidance and control on the energy which 
already here exists (cf. p. 21); for, though they 
alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though 
they merely utilise available energy like any other 
machine, live things are able to direct inorganic 
terrestrial energy along new and special paths, so as 
to achieve results which without such living agency 
could not have occurred — e. g., forests, ant-hills, 
birds' nests, Forth bridge, sonatas, cathedrals. 

I have never taught, nor for a moment thought, 
that " vital force is akin to physical force, but that 
it needs guidance" (p. 747); the phrase sounds to 
me nonsense. I perceive, not as a theory, but as a 
fact, that life is itself a. guiding principle, a control- 



Haeckel's Conjectural Philosophy 117 

ling agency ; *'. e., that a live animal or plant can and 
does guide or influence the elements of inorganic 
nature. The fact of an organism's possessing life 
enables it to build up material into many notable 
forms, — oak, eagle, man, — which material aggregates 
last until they are abandoned by the guiding prin- 
ciple, when they more or less speedily fall into 
decay, or become resolved into their elements, until 
utilised by a fresh incarnation ; and hence I say that 
whatever life is or is not, it is certainly this : it is a 
guiding and controlling entity which reacts upon 
our world according to laws so partially known that 
we have to say they are practically unknown, and 
therefore appear in some respects mysterious. If 
it be thought that I mean by this something super- 
stitious, and for ever inexplicable or unintelligible, 
I have no such meaning. I believe in the ultimate 
intelligibility of the universe, though our present 
brains may require considerable improvement be- 
fore we can grasp the deepest things by their aid ; 
but this matter of " vitality" is probably not hope- 
lessly beyond us; and it does not follow, because 
we have no theory of life or death now, that we 
shall be equally ignorant a century hence. 



n8 Life and Matter 

My chief objection to Professor Haeckel's literary 
work is that he is dogmatic on such points as these, 
and would have people believe, what doubtless he 
believes himself, that he already knows the answer 
to a number of questions in the realms of physical 
nature and of philosophy. He writes in so forcible 
and positive and determined a fashion, from the 
vantage-ground of scientific knowledge, that he 
exerts an undue influence on the uncultured among 
his readers, and causes them to fancy that only 
benighted fools or credulous dupes can really dis- 
agree with the historical criticisms, the speculative 
opinions, and philosophical, or perhaps unphilo- 
sophical, conjectures thus powerfully set forth. 



CHAPTER VIII 

HYPOTHESIS AND ANALOGIES CONCERNING 

LIFE 

THE view concerning Life which I have en- 
deavoured to express is that it is neither 
matter nor energy, nor even a function of matter or 
of energy, but is something belonging to a different 
category ; that by some means, at present unknown, 
it is able to interact with the material world for a 
time, but that it can also exist in some sense inde- 
pendently ; although in that condition of existence 
it is by no means apprehensible by our senses. It 
is dependent on matter for its phenomenal appear- 
ance — for its manifestation to us here and now, and 
for all its terrestrial activities; but otherwise I 
conceive that it is independent, that its essential 
existence is continuous and permanent, though its 
interactions with matter are discontinuous and tem- 
porary; and I conjecture that it is subject to a lav/ 
of evolution — that a linear advance is open to it — 

119 



120 Life and Matter 

whether it be in its phenomenal or in its occult 
state. 

It may be well to indicate what I mean by con- 
ceiving of the possibility that life has an existence 
apart from its material manifestations as we know 
them at present. It is easy to imagine that such a 
view is a mere surmise, having no intelligible mean- 
ing, and that it is merely an attempt to clutch at 
human immortality in an emotional and unscientific 
spirit. To this, however, I in no way plead guilty. 

My ideas about life may be quite wrong, but they 
are as cold-blooded and free from bias as possible ; 
moreover, they apply not to human life alone, but 
to all life — to that of all animals, and even of plants ; 
and they are held by me as a working hypothesis, 
the only one which enables me to fit the known 
facts of ordinary vitality into a thinkable scheme. 
Without it, I should be met by all the usual puzzles: 
(i) as to the stage at which existence begins, if it 
can be thought of as " beginning* ' at all l ; (2) as to 

1 I doubt whether existence can be ** begun" at all, save as the 
result of a juxtaposition of elements, or of a conveyance of motion. 
We can put things together, and we can set things in motion, — 
statics and kinetics, — can we do more? Ether can be strained, 
matter can be moved : I doubt whether we see more than this hap- 
pening in the whole material universe. 



Analogies to Life 121 

the nature of individuality, in the midst of diversity 
of particles, and the determination of form irrespec- 
tive of variety of food ; (3) the extraordinary rapid- 
ity of development, which results in the production 
of a fully endowed individual in the course of some 
fraction of a century. 

With it, I cannot pretend that all these things 
are thoroughly intelligible, but the lines on which 
an explanation may be forthcoming seem to be laid 
down : the notion being that what we see is a tem- 
porary apparition or incarnation of a permanent 
entity or idea. 

It is easiest to explain my meaning by aid of 
analogues, — by the construction, as it were, of 
"models," just as is the custom in physics when- 
ever a recondite idea has to be grasped before it can 
be properly formulated and before a theory is conv 
plete. 

I will take two analogies : one from politics and 
one from magnetism. 

" Parliament,' ' or "the Army," is a body which 
consists of individual members constantly changing, 
and its existence is not dependent on their exist- 
ence : it pre-existed any particular set of them, and 



122 Life and Matter 

it can survive a dissolution. Even after a complete 
slaughter, the idea of the army would survive, and 
another would come into being, to carry on the 
permanent traditions and life. 

Except as an idea in some sentient mind, it could 
not be said to exist at all. The mere individuals 
composing it do not make it : without the idea they 
would be only a disorganised mob. Abstractions 
like the British Constitution, and other such things, 
can hardly be said to have any incarnate existence. 
These exist only as ideas. 

Parliament exists fundamentally as an idea, and 
it can be called into existence or re-incarnated 
again. Whether it is the same Parliament or not 
after a general election is a question that may be 
differently answered. It is not identical, it may 
have different characteristics, but there is certainly 
a sort of continuity ; it is still a British Parliament ; 
for instance, it has not changed its character to that 
of the French Assembly or the American Congress. 
It is a permanent entity even when disembodied ; 
it has a past and it has a future ; it has a funda- 
mentally continuous existence though there are 
breaks or dislocations in its conspicuous activity, 



Analogies to Life 123 

and though each incarnation has a separate identity 
or personality of its own. It is larger and more 
comprehensive than any individual representation 
of it; it may be said to have a "subliminal self," 
of which any septennial period sees but a meagre 
epitome. 

Some of those epitomes are more, some less, 
worthy ; sometimes there appears only a poor de- 
formity or a feeble-minded attempt, sometimes a 
strong and vigorous embodiment of the root idea. 

As to its technical continuity of existence and 
actual mode of reproduction, I suppose it would be 
merely fanciful to liken the " Crown" to those germ- 
cells or nuclei, whose existence continues without 
break, which serve the purpose of collecting and 
composing the somatic cells in due season. 

Other illustrations of the temporary incarnation 
of a permanent idea are readily furnished from the 
domain of art; but, after all, the best analogy to 
life that I can at present think of is to be found in 
the subject of magnetism. 

At one time, it was possible to say that magnet- 
ism could not be produced except by antecedent 
magnetism; that there was no known way of 



124 Life and Matter 

generating it spontaneously ; yet that, since it un- 
doubtedly occurs in certain rocks of the earth, it 
must have come into existence somehow, at a date 
unknown. It could also be said, and it can be said 
still, that, given an initial magnet, any number of 
others can be made, without loss to the generating 
magnet, By influence or induction exerted by 
proximity on other pieces of steel, the properties of 
one magnet can be excited in any number of such 
pieces, — the amount of magnetism thus producible 
being infinite ; that is, being strictly without limit, 
and not dependent at all on the very finite strength 
of the original magnet, which indeed continues un- 
abated. It is just as if magnetism were not really 
manufactured at all, but were a thing called out 
of some infinite reservoir; as if something were 
brought into active and prominent existence from a 
previously dormant state. 

And that indeed is the fact. The process of 
magnetisation, as conducted with a steel magnet on 
other pieces of previously inert steel, in no case 
really generates new lines of magnetic force, though 
it appears to generate them. We now know 
that the lines which thus spring into corporeal 



Analogies to Life 125 

existence, as it were, are essentially closed curves or 
loops, which cannot be generated; they can be ex- 
panded or enlarged to cover a wide field, and they 
can be contracted or shrunk up into insignificance, 
but they cannot be created, they must be pre-exist - 
ent ; they were in the non-magnetised steel all the 
time, though they were so small and ill-arranged 
that they had no perceptible effect whatever; they 
constituted a potentiality for magnetism ; they 
existed as molecular closed curves or loops, which, 
by the operation called magnetisation, could, some 
of them, be opened out into loops of finite area and 
spread out into space, where they are called ' lines 
of force/' They then constitute the region called 
a magnetic field, which remains a seat of so-called 
" permanent' ' magnetic activity, until, by lapse of 
time, excessive heat, or other circumstance, they 
close up again ; and so the magnet, as a magnet, 
dies. The magnetism itself, however, has not 
really died ; it has a perpetual existence, and a 
fresh act of magnetisation can recall it, or some- 
thing indistinguishable from it, into manifest activ- 
ity again; so that it, or its equivalent, can once 
more interact with the rest of material energies, and 



126 Life and Matter 

be dealt with by physicists, or subserve the uses 
of humanity. Until that time of re-appearance its 
existence can only be inferred by the thought of 
the mathematician ; it is indeed a matter of theory, 
not necessarily recognised as true by the practical 
man. 

Our present view is that the act of magnetisation 
consists in a re-arrangement and co-ordination of 
previously existing magnetic elements, lying dor- 
mant, so to speak, in iron and other magnetic 
materials ; only a very small fraction of the whole 
number being usually brought into activity at any 
one time, and not necessarily always the same actual 
set. Only a small and indiscriminate selection is 
made from all the molecular loops; and it can be a 
different group each time, or some elements may be 
different and some the same, whenever a fresh in- 
dividual or magnet is brought into being. 

All this can be said concerning the old process of 
magnetisation — the process as it was doubtless 
familiar to the unknown discoverer of the lodestone, 
to the ancient users of the mariner's compass, and 
to Dr. Gilbert of Colchester, the discoverer of the 
magnetised condition of the earth. 



Analogies to Life 127 

But within the nineteenth century, a fresh process 
of magnetisation has been discovered, and this new 
or electrical process is no longer obviously depend- 
ent on the existence of antecedent magnetism, but 
seems at first sight to be a property freshly or 
spontaneously generated, as it were. The process 
was discovered as the result of setting electricity 
in motion. So long as electricity was studied in 
its condition at rest on charged conductors, as in 
the old science of electrostatics or frictional electric- 
ity, it possessed no magnetic properties whatever, 
nor did it encroach on the magnetic domain : only 
vague similarities in the phenomena of attraction 
and repulsion aroused attention. But directly elec- 
tricity was set in motion, constituting what is called 
an electric current, magnetic lines of force instantly 
sprang into being, without the presence of any steel 
or iron ; and in twenty years they were recognised. 
These electrically generated lines of force are similar 
to those previously known, but they need no mat- 
ter to sustain them. They need matter to display 
them, but they themselves exist equally well in 
perfect vacuum. 

How did they manage to spring into being? Can 



128 Life and Matter 

it be said that they, too, had existed previously 
in some dormant condition in the ether of space? 
That they, too, were closed loops opened out, and 
their existence thus displayed, by the electric cur- 
rent? 

That is an assertion which might reasonably be 
made : it is not the only way of regarding the mat- 
ter, however, and the mode in which a magnetic 
field originates round the path of a moving charge 
— being generated during the acceleration-period 
by a pulse of radiation which travels with the speed 
of light ; being maintained during the steady-motion 
period by a sort of inertia as if in accordance with 
the first law of motion ; and being destroyed only 
by a return pulse of re-radiation during a retarda- 
tion-period when the moving charge is stopped 
or diverted or reversed, — all this can hardly be fully 
explained until the intimate nature of an electric 
charge has been more fully worked out; and the 
subject now trenches too nearly on the more ad- 
vanced parts of physics to be useful any longer as 
an analogue for general readers. 

Indeed, it must be recollected that no analogy 
will bear pressing too far. All that we are con- 



Analogies to Life 129 

cerned to show is that known magnetic behaviour 
exhibits a very fair analogy to some aspects of that 
still more mysterious entity which we call "life"; 
and if any one should assert that all magnetism was 
pre-existent in some ethereal condition; that it 
would never go out of essential existence ; but that 
it could be brought into relation with the world of 
matter by certain acts, — that while there it could 
operate in a certain way, controlling the motion of 
bodies, interacting with forms of energy, producing 
sundry effects for a time, and then disappearing 
from our ken to the immaterial region whence it 
came, — he would be saying what no physicist 
would think it worth while to object to, — what 
many, indeed, might agree with. 

Well, that is the kind of assertion which I want 
to make, as a working hypothesis, concerning life. 

An acorn has in itself the potentiality not of one 
oak-tree alone, but of a forest of oak-trees, to the 
thousandth generation, and indeed of oak-trees 
without end. There is no sort of law of " conserva- 
tion' ' here. It is not as if something were passed 
on from one thing to another. It is not analogous 
to energy at all; it is analogous to the magnetism 



130 Life and Matter 

which can be excited by any given magnet; the 
required energy, in both cases, being extraneously 
supplied, and only transmuted into the appropriate 
form by the guiding principle which controls the 
operation. 

We do not at present know how to generate life 
without the action of antecedent life, though that 
may be a discovery lying ready for us in the future ; 
but even if we did, it would still be true (as I think) 
that the life was in some sense pre-existent ; that it 
was not really created de novo ; that it was brought 
into actual practical every-day existence doubtless, 
but that it had pre-existed in some sense too; 
being called out, as it were, from some great 
reservoir or storehouse of vitality, to which, when 
its earthly career is ended, it will return. 

Indeed, it cannot in any proper sense be said ever 
to have left that storehouse, though it has been 
made to interact with the world for a time; and, if 
we might so express it, it may be thought of as 
carrying back with it, into the general reservoir, 
any individuality, and any experience and training 
or development, which it can be thought of as hav- 
ing acquired here. Such a statement as this last 



Analogies to Life 131 

cannot be made of magnetism, to which no known 
law of evolution and progress can be supposed to 
apply; but of life, of anything subject to continu- 
ous evolution or linear progress embodied in the 
race, of any condition not cyclically determinate 
and returning into itself, but progressing and ad- 
vancing — acquiring fresh potentialities, fresh pow- 
ers, fresh beauties, new characteristics such as 
perhaps may never in the whole universe have been 
displayed before— of everything which possesses 
such powers as these, a statement akin to the above 
may certainly be made. To all such things, when 
they reach a high enough stage, the ideas of con- 
tinued personality, of memory, of persistent indi- 
vidual existence, not only may, but I think must, 
apply, notwithstanding the admitted return of the 
individual after each incarnation to the central 
store from which it was differentiated and individ- 
ualised. 

Even so a villager, picked out as a recruit and 
sent to the seat of war, may serve his country, may 
gain experience, acquire a soul and a width of hori- 
zon such as he had not dreamed of; and when he 
returns, after the war is over, may be merged as 



13 2 Life and Matter 

before in his native village. But the village is the 
richer for his presence, and his individuality or 
personality is not really lost ; though to the eye of 
the world, which has no further need for it, it has 
practically ceased to be. 



CHAPTER IX 

WILL AND GUIDANCE 

{Partially read to the Synthetic Society in February, ipoj) 

THE influence of the divine on the human, and 
on the material world, has been variously 
conceived in different ages, and various forms of 
difficulty have been at different times felt and sug- 
gested; but always some sort of analogy between 
human action and divine action has had perforce 
to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least 
intelligible to our conception. The latest form of 
difficulty is peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natu- 
ral outcome of an age of physical science. It con- 
sists in denying the possibility of any guidance or 
control, — not only on the part of a Deity, but on 
the part of every one of His creatures. It consists in 
pressing the laws of physics to what may seem their 
logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the 
conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, 

133 



134 Life and Matter 

and so excluding altogether, as some have fancied, 
the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of 
the self-determined action of mind or living things 
upon matter. The appearance of control has ac- 
cordingly been considered illusory, and has been 
replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism, envelop- 
ing living things as well as inorganic nature. 

And those who for any reason have felt disin- 
clined or unable to acquiesce in this exclusion of 
non-mechanical agencies, whether it be by reason 
of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experi- 
ence and sensation to the contrary, have thought it 
necessary of late years to seek to undermine the 
foundation of physics, and to show that its much- 
vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their 
exactitude is illusory, — that the conservation of 
energy, for instance, has been too rapid an induc- 
tion, that there may be ways of eluding many 
physical laws and of avoiding submission to their 
sovereign sway. 

By this sacrifice it has been thought that the 
eliminated guidance and control can philosophically 
be reintroduced. 

This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of 



Will and Guidance 135 

a critical examination of the foundations of physics 
by an American author, J. B. Stallo, in a little book 
called the Concepts of Physics, But the worst of 
that book was that Judge Stallo was not fully 
familiar with the teachings of the great physicists ; 
he appears to have collected his information from 
popular writings, where the doctrines were very im- 
perfectly laid down ; so that part of his book is 
occupied in demolishing constructions of straw, un- 
recognisable by professed physicists except as cari- 
catures at which they also might be willing to heave 
an occasional missile. 

The armoury pressed into the service of Professor 
James Ward's not wholly dissimilar attack on 
physics is of heavy calibre, and his criticism cannot 
in general be ignored as based upon inadequate 
acquaintance with the principles under discussion ; 
but still his Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or 
antagonism between the fundamental laws of me- 
chanics and the possibility of any intervention, 
whether human or divine. 

If this antagonism is substantial it is serious; for 
natural philosophers will not be willing to concede 
fundamental inaccuracy or uncertainty about their 



136 Life and Matter 

recognised and long-established laws of motion, 
when applied to ordinary matter; nor will they be 
prepared to tolerate any the least departure from 
the law of the conservation of energy, when all 
forms of energy are taken into account. Hence, if 
guidance and control can be admitted into the 
scheme by no means short of undermining and re- 
futing those laws, there may be every expectation 
that the attitude of scientific men will be peren- 
nially hostile to the idea of guidance or control, and 
so to the efficacy of prayer, and to many another 
practical outcome of religious belief. It becomes, 
therefore, an important question to consider whether 
it is true that life or mind is incompetent to dis- 
arrange or interfere with matter at all, except as 
itself an automatic part of the machine, — whether, 
in fact, it is merely an ornamental appendage or 
phantasmal accessory of the working parts. 

Now experience — the same kind of experience as 
gave us our scheme of mechanics — shows us that to 
all appearance live animals certainly can direct and 
control mechanical energies to bring about desired 
and preconceived results; and that man can defi- 
nitely will that those results shall occur. The way 



Will and Guidance 137 

the energy is provided is understood, and its mode 
of application is fairly understood; what is not 
understood is the way its activity is determined. 
Undoubtedly our body is material and can act on 
other matter; and the energy of its operations is 
derived from food, like any other self-propelled and 
fuel-fed mechanism ; but mechanism is usually con- 
trolled by an attendant. The question is whether 
our will or mind or life can direct our body's energy 
along certain channels to attain desired ends, or 
whether — as in a motor-car with an automaton 
driver — the end and aim of all activity is wholly 
determined by mechanical causes. And a further 
question concerns the mode whereby vital control, 
if any, is achieved. 

Answers that might be hazarded are: 

{a) That life is itself a latent store of energy, and 
achieves its results by imparting to matter energy 
that would not otherwise be in evidence : in which 
case life would be a part of the machine, and as 
truly mechanical as all the rest. 

Experiment lends no support to this view of the 
relation between life and energy, and I hold that it 
is false; because the essential property of energy is 



138 Life and Matter 

that it can transform itself into other forms, remain- 
ing constant in quantity, whereas life does not add 
to the stock of any known form of energy, nor does 
death affect the sum of energy in any known way. 

{b) That life is something outside the scheme of 
mechanics — outside the categories of matter and 
energy ; though it can nevertheless control or direct 
material forces — timing them and determining their 
place of application, — subject always to the laws of 
energy and all other mechanical laws ; supplement- 
ing or accompanying these laws, therefore, but con- 
tradicting or traversing them no whit. 

This second answer I hold to be true; but in 
order to admit its truth we must recognise that 
force can be exerted and energy directed by suit- 
able adjustment of existing energy, without any in- 
troduction of energy from without ; in other words, 
that the energy of operations automatically going 
on in any active region of the universe — any region 
where transformation and transference of energy are 
continuously occurring, whether life be present or 
not — can be guided along paths that it would not 
automatically have taken, and can be directed so as 
to produce effects that would not otherwise have 
occurred ; and this without any breakage or suspen 



Will and Guidance 139 

sion of the laws of dynamics, and in full correspond- 
ence with both the conservation of energy and the 
conservation of momentum. 

That is where I part company with Professor 
James Ward in the second volume of Naturalism 
and Agnosticism ; with whom, nevertheless, on many 
broad issues I find myself in fair agreement. Those 
who find a real antinomy between " mechanism and 
morals'* must either throw overboard the possibility 
of interference or guidance or willed action alto- 
gether, which is one alternative, or must assume 
that the laws of physics are only approximate and 
untrustworthy, which is the other alternative — the 
alternative apparently favoured by Professor James 
Ward. I wish to argue that neither of these alter- 
natives is necessary, and that there is a third or 
middle course of proverbial safety : all that is neces- 
sary is to realise and admit that the laws of physical 
science are incomplete, when regarded as a formula- 
tion and philosophical summary of the universe in 
general. No Laplacian calculator can be supplied 
with all the data. 

In a stagnant and inactive world life would ad- 
mittedly be powerless : it could only make dry bones 



i4° Life and Matter 

stir in such a world if itself were a form of energy ; 
I do not suppose for a moment that it could 
be incarnated in such a world; it is only potent 
where inorganic energy is mechanically "available " 
— to use Lord Kelvin's term, — that is to say, is 
either potentially or actually in process of trans- 
fer and transformation. In others words, life can 
generate no trace of energy ; it can only guide its 
transmutations. 

It has gradually dawned upon me that the reason 
why philosophers who are well acquainted with 
physical or dynamical science are apt to fall into 
the error of supposing that mental and vital inter- 
ference with the material world is impossible, in 
spite of their clamorous experience to the contrary 
(or else, on the strength of that experience, to con- 
ceive that there is something the matter with the 
formulation of physical and dynamical laws), is be- 
cause all such interference is naturally and neces- 
sarily excluded from scientific methods and treatises. 

In pure mechanics, "force " is treated as a func- 
tion of configuration and momentum : the positions, 
the velocities, and the accelerations of a conserva- 
tive system depend solely on each other, on initial 



Will and Guidance 14 1 

conditions, and on mass ; or, if we choose so to ex- 
press it, the co-ordinates, the momenta, and the 
kinetic energies of the parts of any dynamical sys- 
tem whatever are all functions of time and of each 
other, and of nothing else. In other words, we 
have to deal, in this mode of regarding things, with 
a definite and completely determinate world, to 
which prediction may confidently be applied. 

But this determinateness is gotten by refusing to • 
contemplate anything outside a certain scheme : it 
is an internal truth within the assigned boundaries, 
and is quite consistent with psychical interference 
and indeterminateness, as soon as those boundaries 
are ignored; determinateness is not part of the 
essence of dynamical doctrine, it is arrived at by the 
tacit assumption that no undynamical or hyper- 
dynamical agencies exist : in short, by that process 
of abstraction which is invariably necessary for sim- 
plicity, and indeed for possibility, of methodical 
human treatment. Every one engaged in scientific 
research is aware that if exuberant charwomen, or 
intelligent but mischievous students (who for a 
moment may be taken to represent life and mind 
respectively), are admitted into a laboratory and full 



H 2 Life and Matter 

scope given to their activities, the scientific results 
— though still, no doubt, in some strained sense, 
concordant with law and order — are apt to be too 
complicated for investigation; wherefore there is 
usually an endeavour to exclude these incalculable 
influences, and to make a tacit assumption that they 
have not been let in. 

There is a similar tacit assumption in treatises on 
physics and chemistry: viz., that the laws of auto- 
matic nature shall be allowed unrestricted and un- 
aided play; that nothing shall intervene in any 
operation from start to finish save mechanical se- 
quent and antecedent ; that it is permissible, in fact, 
to exercise abstraction, as usual, to the exclusion of 
agents not necessarily connected with the problem, 
and not contemplated by the equations. 

In text-books of dynamics and in treatises of 
natural philosophy that is a perfectly legitimate 
procedure 1 ; but when, later on, we come to philoso- 
phise, and to deal with the universe as a whole, we 
must forego the ingrained habit of abstraction, and 
must remember that for a complete treatment nothing 

1 It is on this basis that there is a science of rigid dynamics, with 
elasticity and fluidity excluded ; and thus also can there be a hydro- 
dynamics in which the consequences of viscosity are ignored. 



Will and Guidance 143 

must permanently be ignored. So if life and mind 
and will, and curiosity and mischief and folly, and 
greed and fraud and malice, and a whole catalogue 
of attributes and things not contemplated in natural 
philosophy — if these are known to have any real 
existence in the larger world of total experience, 
and if there is any reason to believe that any one of 
them may have had some influence in determining 
an observed result, then it is foolish to exclude 
these things from philosophic consideration on the 
ground that they are out of place in the realm of 
natural philosophy, that they are not allowed for 
in its scheme, and therefore cannot possibly be sup- 
posed capable of exerting any effective interference, 
any real guidance or control. 

My contention then is— and in this contention I 
am practically speaking for my brother physicists — 
that whereas life or mind can neither generate 
energy nor directly exert force, yet it can cause 
matter to exert force on matter, and so can exercise 
guidance and control : it can so prepare any scene 
of activity, by arranging the position of existing 
material, and timing the liberation of existing 
energy, as to produce results concordant with an 



144 Life and Matter 

idea or scheme or intention : it can, in short, "aim" 
and (< fire. M 

Guidance of matter can be effected by a passive 
exertion of force without doing work ; as a quiescent 
rail can guide a train to its destination, provided an 
active engine propels it. But the analogy of the 
rail must not be pressed: the rail 4< guides* ' by ex- 
erting force perpendicular to the direction of 
motion ; it does no work but it sustains an equal 
opposite reaction. 1 The guidance exercised by life 
or mind is managed in an unknown but certainly 
different fashion: "determination " can sustain no 
reaction — if it could it would be a straightforward 
mechanical agent, but it can utilise the mechanical 

1 It is well to bear in mind the distinction between " force" and 
"energy." These terms have been so popularly confused that it 
may be difficult always to discriminate them, but in physics they are 
absolutely discriminated. We have a direct sense of " force" in our 
muscles, whether they be moving or at rest. A force in motion is a 
1 "power"; it "does work" and transfers energy from one body to 
another, which is commonly, though incorrectly, spoken of as "gen- 
erating" energy. But a force at rest — a mere statical stress, like 
that exerted by a pillar or a watershed — does no work, and 4 ' gener- 
ates " or transfers no energy ; yet the one sustains a roof which 
would otherwise fall, thereby screening a portion of ground from 
vegetation ; while the other deflects a rain-drop into the Danube or 
the Rhine. This latter is the kind of force which constrains a stone 
to revolve in a circle instead of a straight line ; a force like that of a 
groove or slot or channel or " guide." 



Will and Guidance 145 

properties both of rail and of engine ; it arranged for 
the rail to be placed in position so that the lateral 
force thereby exerted should guide all future trains 
to a desired destination, and it further took steps to 
design and compose locomotives of sufficient power, 
and to start them at a prearranged time. It "em- 
ploys" mechanical stress as a capitalist employs a 
labourer, — not doing anything itself, but directing 
the operations. It is impossible to explain all this 
fully by the laws of mechanics alone, that is to say, 
no mechanical analysis can be complete and all- 
embracing, though the whole procedure is fully sub- 
ject to those laws. 

To every force there is an equal opposite force or 
reaction, and a reaction may be against a live body, 
but it is never suspected of being against the ab- 
straction, life or mind — that would indeed be en- 
larging the scope of mechanics !— the reaction is 
always against some other body. All stresses, as a 
matter of fact, occur in the ether; and they all have 
a material terminus at each end (or, in exceptional 
cases, a wave-front or some other recondite ethereal 
equivalent); that is to say, something possessing 
inertia; but the timed or opportune existence of a 



146 Life and Matter 

particular stress may be the result of organisation 
and control. Mechanical operations can be thus 
dominated by intelligence and purpose. When a 
stone is rolling over a cliff, it is all the same to 
4 * energy " whether it fall on point A or point B of 
the beach. But at A it shall merely dent the sand, 
whereas at B it shall strike a detonator and explode 
a mine. Scribbling on a piece of paper results in a 
certain distribution of fluid and production of a 
modicum of heat: so far as energy is concerned it 
is the same whether we sign Andrew Carnegie or 
Alexander Coppersmith, yet the one effort may 
land us in twelve months' imprisonment or may 
build a library, according to circumstances, while 
the other achieves no result at all. John Stuart 
Mill used to say that our sole power over nature 
was to move things ; but, strictly speaking, we cannot 
do even that : we can only arrange that things shall 
move each other, and can determine by suitably 
preconceived plans the kind and direction of the 
motion that shall ensue at a given time and place, 
provided always that we include in this category of 
"things " our undoubtedly material bodies, muscles, 
and nerves. 



Will and Guidance 147 

But here is just the puzzle: at what point does 
will or determination enter into the scheme? Con- 
template a brain-cell, whence originates a certain 
nerve-process whereby energy is liberated with some 
resultant effect ; what pulled the detent in that cell 
which started the impulse? No doubt some chemi- 
cal process : combination or dissociation, something 
atomic, occurred; but what made it occur just then 
and in that w r ay? 

I answer, Not anything that we as yet understand, 
but apparently the same sort of prearrangement 
that determined whether the stone from the cliff 
should fall on point A or point B ; the same sort of 
process that guided the pen to make legible and 
effective writing instead of illegible and ineffective 
scrawls; the same kind of control that determines 
when and where a trigger shall be pulled so as to 
secure the anticipated slaughter of a bird. So far 
as energy is concerned, the explosion and the 
trigger-pulling are the same identical operations, 
whether the aim be exact or random. It is intelli- 
gence which directs; it is physical energy which is 
directed and controlled and produces the result in 
time and space. 



148 Life and Matter 

It will be said some energy is needed to pull a 
hair-trigger, to open the throttle-valve of an engine, 
to press the button which shall shatter a rock. 
Granted : but the work-concomitants of that energy 
are all familiar, and equally present whether it be 
arranged so as to produce any predetermined effect 
or not. The opening of the throttle-valve, for in- 
stance, demands just the same exertion, and results 
in just the same imperceptible transformation of 
fully-accounted-for energy, whether it be used to 
start a train in accordance with a time-table and the 
guard's whistle, or whether it be pushed over, as if 
by the wind, at random. The shouting of an order 
to a troop demands vocal energy and produces its 
due equivalent of sound; but the intelligibility of 
the order is something superadded, and its result 
may be to make not sound or heat alone, but 
history. 

Energy must be available for the performance of 
any physical operation, but the energy is independ- 
ent of the determination or arrangement. Guid- 
ance and control are not forms of energy, nor need 
they be themselves phantom modes of force : their 
superposition upon the scheme of physics need per- 



Will and Guidance 149 

turb physical and mechanical laws no whit, and yet 
it may profoundly affect the consequences resulting 
from those same laws. The whole effort of civil- 
isation would be futile if we could not guide the 
powers of nature. The powers are there, else we 
should be helpless; but life and mind are outside 
those powers, and, by prearranging their field of 
action, can direct them along an organised course. 

And this same life or mind, as we know it, is 
accessible to petition, to affection, to pity, to a 
multitude of non-physical influences; and hence, 
indirectly, the little plot of physical universe which 
is now our temporary home has become amenable 
to truly spiritual control. 

I lay stress upon a study of the nature and mode 
of human action of the interfering or guiding kind, 
because by that study we must be led if we are to 
form any intelligent conception of divine action. 
True, it might be feasible to admit divine agency 
and yet to deny the possibility of any human power 
of the same kind, — though that would be a nebulous 
and at least inconclusive procedure ; but if once we 
are constrained to admit the existence and reality 



150 Life and Matter 

of human guidance and control, superposed upon 
the physical scheme, we cannot deny the possibility 
of such power and action to any higher being, or 
even to any totality of Mind of which ours is a part. 
I do not see how the function claimed can be re- 
sented, except by those who deny "life" to be any- 
thing at all. If it exists, if it is not mere illusion, it 
appears to me to be something whose full signifi- 
cance lies in another scheme of things, but which 
touches and interacts with this material universe in 
a certain way, building its particles into notable 
configurations for a time — without confounding any 
physical laws: and then evaporating whence it 
came. This language is vague and figurative un- 
doubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we 
have not yet a theory of life— we have not even a 
theory of the essential nature of gravitation ; dis- 
coveries are waiting to be made in this region, and 
it is absurd to suppose that we are already in pos- 
session of all the data. We can wait ; but mean- 
while we need not pretend that, because we do not 
understand them, therefore life and will can accom- 
plish nothing; we need not imagine that" life ' ' — 
with its higher developments and still latent powers 



Will and Guidance 151 

— is an impotent nonentity. The philosophic atti- 
tude, surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, 
both what it can and what it cannot achieve, and to 
realise that our present knowledge of it is extremely 
partial and incomplete. 

Note on Free Will and Foreknowledge 

In the above chapter I must not be understood 
as pretending to settle the thorny question of a re- 
conciliation between freedom of choice and prede- 
termination or prevision. All I there contend for is 
that no mechanical or scientific determinism, subject 
to special conditions in a limited region, can be used 
to contradict freedom of the will, under generalised 
conditions, in the universe as a whole. 

Nevertheless there are things which may perhaps 
be usefully said, even on the larger and much-worn 
topic of the present note. If we still endeavour to 
learn as much as possible from human analogies, ex- 
amples are easy : 

An architect can draw in detail a building that is 
to be; the dwellers in a valley can be warned to 
evacuate their homesteads because a city has deter- 
mined that a lake shall exist where none existed 



152 Life and Matter 

before. Doubtless the city is free to change its 
mind, but it is not expected to ; and all predictions 
are understood to be made subject to the absence of 
disturbing, i. e. y unforeseen, causes. Even the pre- 
diction of an eclipse is not free from a remote un- 
certainty, and in the case of the return of meteoric 
showers and comets the element of contingency is 
not even remote. 

But it will be said that to higher and superhu- 
man knowledge all possible contingencies would be 
known and recognised as part of the data. That is 
quite possibly, though not quite certainly, true: 
and there comes the real difficulty of reconciling ab- 
solute prediction of events with real freedom of the 
actors in the drama. I anticipate that a complete 
solution of the problem must involve a treatment of 
the subject of time, and a recognition that "time," 
as it appears to us, is really part of our human limi- 
tations. We all realise that "the past " is in some 
sense not non-existent but only past; we may 
readily surmise that "the future" is similarly in 
some sense existent, only that we have not yet 
arrived at it ; and our links with the future are less 
understood. That a seer in a moment of clairvoy- 



Will and Guidance 153 

ance may catch a glimpse of futurity — some partial 
picture of what perhaps exists even now in the fore- 
thought of some higher mind — is not inconceivable. 
It may be, after all, only an unconscious and inspired 
inference from the present, on an enlarged and ex- 
ceptional scale ; and it is a matter for straightforward 
investigation whether such prevision ever occurs. 

The following article, on the general subject of 
"Free Will and Determinism/ ' reprinted by per- 
mission from the Contemporary Review for 1904, 
may conveniently be here reproduced : 

"The conflict between Free Will and Determinism 
depends on a question of boundaries. We occa- 
sionally ignore the fact that there must be a subjec- 
tive partition in the universe separating the region 
of which we have some inkling of knowledge from 
the region of which we have absolutely none; we 
are apt to regard the portion on our side as if it 
were the whole, and to debate whether it must or 
must not be regarded as self-determined. As a 
matter of fact, any partitioned-off region is in gen- 
eral not completely self-determined, since it is liable 
to be acted upon by influences from the other side 
of the partition. If the far side of the boundary is 
ignored, then an observer on the near side will con- 
clude that things really initiate their own motion 
and act without stimulation or motive, in some 



154 Life and Matter 

cases, whereas the fact is that no act is performed 
without stimulus or motive ; even irrational acts are 
caused by something, and so also are rational acts. 
Madness and delirium are natural phenomena amen- 
able to law. 

"But in actual life we are living on one side of a 
boundary, and are aware of things on one side only; 
the things on this side appear to us to constitute the 
whole universe, since they are all of which we have 
any knowledge, either through our senses or in other 
ways. Hence we are subject to certain illusions, 
and feel certain difficulties: the illusion of unstimu- 
lated and unmotived freedom of action, and the 
difficulty of reconciling this with the felt necessity 
for general determinism and causation. 

"If we speak in terms of the part of the universe 
that we know and have to do with, we find free 
agencies rampant among organic life; so that "free- 
dom of action" is a definite and real experience, and 
for practical convenience is so expressed. But if we 
could seize the entirety of things and perceive what 
was occurring beyond the range of our limited con- 
ceptions we should realise that the whole was welded 
together, and that influences were coming through 
which produced the effects that we observe. 

"Those philosophers, if there are any, who assert 
that we are wholly chained, bound, and controlled 
by the circumstances of that part of the universe of 
which we are directly aware — that we are the slaves 
of our environment and must act as we are com- 
pelled by forces emanating from things on our side 
of the boundary alone, — those philosophers err. 



Will and Guidance 155 

"This kind of determinism is false; and the re- 
action against it has led other philosophers to assert 
that we are lawlessly free, and able to initiate any 
action without motive or cause, — that each individ- 
ual is a capricious and chaotic entity, not part of a 
cosmos at all ! 

"It may be doubted whether any one has clearly 
and actually maintained either of these theses in all 
its crudity ; but there are many who vigorously and 
cheaply deny one or other of them, and in so deny- 
ing the one conceive that they are maintaining the 
other. Both the above theses are false; yet Free 
Will and Determinism are both true, and in a com- 
pletely known universe would cease to be contra- 
dictories. 

"The reconciliation between opposing views lies 
in realising that the universe of which we have a 
kind of knowledge is but a portion or an aspect of 
the whole. 

"We are free, and we are controlled. We are 
free, in so far as our sensible surroundings and im- 
mediate environment are concerned ; that is, we are 
free for all practical purposes, and can choose be- 
tween alternatives as they present themselves. We 
are controlled, as being intrinsic parts of an entire 
cosmos suffused with law and order. 

"No scheme of science based on knowledge of our 
environment can confidently predict our actions, 
nor the actions of any sufficiently intelligent live 
creature. For ' ' mind ' ' and * ' will ' ' have their roots 
on the other side of the partition, and that which 
we perceive of them is but a fraction of the whole. 



156 Life and Matter 

Nevertheless, the more developed and consistent 
and harmonious our character becomes, the less 
liable is it to random outbreaks, and the more cer- 
tainly can we be depended on. We thus, even 
now, can exhibit some approximation to the highest 
state — that conscious unison with the entire scheme 
of existence which is identical with perfect freedom. 
"If we could grasp the totality of things we 
should realise that everything was ordered and 
definite, linked up with everything else in a chain of 
causation, and that nothing was capricious and un- 
certain and uncontrolled. The totality of things is, 
however, and must remain, beyond our grasp ; hence 
the actual working of the process, the nature of the 
links, the causes which create our determinations, 
are frequently unknown. And since it is necessary 
for practical purposes to treat what is utterly be- 
yond our ken as if it were non-existent, it becomes 
easily possible to fall into the erroneous habit of 
conceiving the transcendental region to be com- 
pletely inoperative.' J 



CHAPTER X 

FURTHER SPECULATION AS TO THE ORIGIN 
AND NATURE OF LIFE 2 

Preliminary Remarks on Recent Views in Chemistry 

IT is a fact extremely familiar to chemists that 
the groupings possible to atoms of carbon are 
exceptionally numerous and complicated, each 
carbon atom having the power of linking itself with 
others to an extraordinary extent, so that it is no 
exceptional thing to find a substance which con- 
tains twenty or thirty atoms of carbon as well as 
other elements linked together in its molecule in a 
perfectly definite way, the molecule being still 
classifiable as that of a definite chemical compound. 
But there are also some non-elementary bodies 
which, although they are chemically complete and 
satisfied, retain a considerable vestige of power to 

1 An article reprinted from the North American Review for May, 
1905. 

157 



158 Life and Matter 

link their molecules together so as to make a com- 
plex and massive compound molecule; and these 
are able not only to link similar molecules into a 
more or less indefinite chain, but to unite and in- 
clude the saturated molecules of many other sub- 
stances also into the unwieldy aggregate. 

Of the non-elementary bodies possessing this 
property, water appears to be one of the chief; for 
there is evidence to show that the ordinary H s O 
molecule of water, although it may be properly 
spoken of as a saturated or satisfied compound, sel- 
dom exists in the simple isolated shape depicted by 
this formula, but rather that a great number of such 
simple molecules attach themselves to each other 
by what is called their residual or outstanding 
affinity, and build themselves up into a complex 
aggregate. 

The doctrine of residual affinity has been long 
advocated by Armstrong; and the present writer 
has recently shown that it is a necessary conse- 
quence of the electrical theory of chemical affinity, 1 
and that the structure of the resulting groupings, 
or compound aggregates, may be partially studied 

1 See Nature, vol. lxx., p. 176, June 23, 1904. 



Origin and Nature of Life 159 

by means of floating magnets, somewhat after the 
manner of Alfred Mayer. 1 

It may be well here to explain to students that 
one of the lines of argument which lead to the con- 
clusion that the water molecule, as it ordinarily 
exists, is really complex and massive, is based upon 
measurements of the Faraday dielectric constant 
for water; for this constant, or " specific inductive 
capacity/' is found to be very large, something like 
fifty times that of air or free ether; whereas for 
glass it is only five or six times that of free space. 
The dielectric constant of a substance generally in- 
creases with the density or massiveness of its mole- 
cule, — indeed, the value of this constant is one of 
the methods whereby matter displays its interaction 
with and loading of the free ether of space, —and 
any such density as the conventional nine times 
that of hydrogen for the molecule of water would 
be wholly unable to explain its immense dielectric 
constant. 

The influence of the massiveness of a water mole- 
cule is also displayed in its power of knocking 

1 See an article on " Modern Views of Chemical Affinity," by the 
present writer in a magazine called Technics, for September, 1904. 



160 Life and Matter 

asunder or dissociating any salts or other simple 
chemical substance introduced into it; common 
salt, for instance, is found always to have a certain 
percentage of its molecules knocked or torn asunder 
directly it is dissolved in water, so that, in addition 
to a number of salt molecules in solution, there are 
a few positively charged sodium atoms and a few 
negatively charged chlorine atoms, existing in a 
state of loose attraction to the water aggregate, and 
amenable to the smallest electric force; which, 
when applied, urges the chlorine one way and the 
sodium the other way, so that they can be removed 
at an electrode and their place supplied by freshly 
dissociated molecules of salt, thus bringing about 
its permanent electro-chemical decomposition, and 
enabling the water to behave as an electrolytic con- 
ductor directly a little salt or acid is dissolved in it. 
The power of the water molecule to associate 
itself with molecules of other substances is illus- 
trated by the well-known fact that water is an 
almost universal solvent. It is its residual affinity 
which enables it to enter into weak chemical com- 
bination with a large number of other substances, 
and thus to dissolve those substances. The dis- 



Origin and Nature of Life 161 

solving power usually increases when the tempera- 
ture is raised, possibly because the self-contained 
or self-sufficient groupings of the water molecules 
are then to some extent broken up and the frag- 
ments enabled to cling to the foreign or intro- 
duced matter instead of only to each other. The 
foreign substance is apt to be extruded again when 
the liquid cools, and when the affinity of the water- 
aggregates for each other resumes its sway. Very 
hot water can dissolve not only the substances 
familiarly known to be soluble in water, but it can 
dissolve things like glass also, so that glass vessels 
are unable to retain water kept under high pressure 
at a very high temperature, approaching a red 
heat. 

Another material which also seems to have the 
power of combining with a number of other bodies, 
under the influence of the loose mode of chemical 
combination spoken of as residual affinity, is carbon ; 
so that a block of charcoal can absorb hundreds of 
times its own bulk of certain gases. 

Indeed, Sir James Dewar has recently employed 
this absorbing power of very cold carbon to produce 
a perfect kind of vacuum, which may, perhaps, be 



1 62 Life and Matter 

the nearest approach to absolute vacuum that has 
yet been attained ; probably higher than can be at- 
tained by any kind of mechanical or mercury pump. 

Unexpected Influence of Size 

Suppose now a substance contains a great num- 
ber of carbon molecules and a great number of 
water molecules, each of which has this residual 
affinity or power of clinging together well de- 
veloped, what may be expected to be the result? 
Surely, the formation of a molecule consisting of 
thousands or hundreds of thousands of atoms con- 
stituting substances more complex even than those 
already known to, or analysable by, organic chemis- 
try ; and if these complex molecules likewise pos- 
sess the adhesive faculty, a grouping of millions or 
even billions of atoms may ultimately be formed. 
(A billion, that is, a million millions, of atoms is 
truly an immense number, but the resulting aggre- 
gate is still excessively minute. A portion of sub- 
stance consisting of a billion atoms is only barely 
visible with the highest power of a microscope; and 
a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the 
naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must 



Origin and Nature of Life 163 

be a million times bigger still.) Such a grouping 
is likely to have properties differing not only 
in degree but in kind from the properties of simple 
substances. 

For it must not be thought that aggregation pro- 
duces only quantitative change and leaves quality 
unaltered. Fresh qualities altogether are liable to 
be introduced or to make their appearance at cer- 
tain stages — certain critical stages — in the building 
up of a complex mass (cf. p. 62). 

The habitability of a house, for instance, de- 
pends on its possessing a cavity of a certain size; 
there is a critical size of brick-aggregate which 
enables it to serve as a dwelling. Nothing much 
smaller than this would do at all. The aggregate 
retains this property, thus conferred upon it by 
size, however big it may be made after that ; until 
it becomes a palace or a cathedral, when it may 
perhaps reach an upper limit of size at which it 
would be crushed by its own weight, or at which 
the span of roof is too great to be supported. But 
the difference, as regards habitability, between a 
palace and a hovel is far less than that between a 
hovel and one of the air-holes in a brick or loaf, or 



1 64 Life and Matter 

any other cavity too small to act as a human habi- 
tation. The difference as regards habitability is 
then an infinite difference. 

To take a less trivial instance : a planet which is 
large enough to retain an atmosphere by its gravi- 
tative attraction differs utterly, in potentiality and 
importance, from the numerous lumps of matter 
scattered throughout space, which, though they 
may be as large as a haystack or a mountain, or as 
the British Isles, or even Europe, are yet too small 
to hold any trace of air to their surface, and there- 
fore cannot in any intelligible sense of the word be 
regarded as habitable. One of the lumps of matter 
in space can become a habitable planet only when 
it has attained a certain size, which conceivably it 
might do by falling together with others into a 
complex aggregate under the influence of gravita- 
tive attraction. The asteroids have not succeeded 
in doing this, but the planets have; and, accord- 
ingly, one of them, at any rate, has become a habit- 
able world. 

But observe that the great size and the conse- 
quent retention of an atmosphere did not generate 
the inhabitants; it satisfied one of the conditions 



Origin and Nature of Life 165 

necessary for their existence. How they arose is 
another matter. All that we have seen so far is 
that an aggregate of bodies may possess properties 
and powers which the separate bodies themselves 
possess in no kind or sort of way. It is not a ques- 
tion of degree, but of kind. 

So also, further, if the aggregate is large enough, 
— very much larger than any planet, as large as a 
million earths aggregated together, — it acquires the 
property of conspicuous radio-activity, it becomes 
a self-heating and self-luminous body, able to keep 
the ether violently agitated in all space round it, 
and thus to supply the radiation necessary for pro- 
tecting the habitable worlds from the cold of space 
to which they are exposed, for maintaining them 
at a temperature appropriate to organic existence, 
and likewise for supplying and generating the en- 
ergy for their myriad activities. It has become, in 
fact, a central sun and source of heat, solely because 
of its enormous size combined with the fact of the 
mutual gravitative attraction of its own constituent 
particles. No body of moderate size could perform 
this function, nor act as a perennial furnace to the 
rest. 



1 66 Life and Matter 

Application to Protoplasm 

Very well, then, return now to our complex 
molecular aggregate, and ask what new property, 
beyond the province of ordinary chemistry and 
physics, is to be expected of a compound which 
contains millions or billions of atoms attached to 
each other in no rigid, stable, frigid manner, but by 
loose, unstable links, enabling them constantly to 
re-arrange themselves and to be the theatre of per- 
petual change, aggregating and re-aggregating in 
various ways and manifesting ceaseless activities. 
Such unstable aggregates of matter may, like the 
water of a pond or a heap of organic refuse, serve 
as the vehicle for influences wholly novel and 
unexpected. 

Too much agitation — that is, too high a tem- 
perature — will split them up and destroy the new- 
found potentiality of such aggregates; too little 
agitation — that is, too low a temperature — will 
permit them to begin to cohere and settle down 
into frozen, rigid masses insusceptible of manifold 
activities. But take them just at the right tem- 
perature, when sufficiently complex and sufficiently 
mobile, — take care of them, so to speak, for the 



Origin and Nature of Life 167 

structure may easily be killed, — and what shall we 
find? We could not exactly guess what would be 
the result, but we can observe the result as it is. 

The result is that the complexes group them- 
selves into minute masses visible in the microscope, 
each mass being called by us a" cell"; that these 
cells possess the power of uniting with or assimilat- 
ing other cells, or fragments of cells, as they drift 
by and come into contact with them ; and that they 
absorb into their own substance such portions as 
may be suitable, while the insufficiently elaborated 
portions — the grains of inorganic or over-simple 
material — are presently extruded. They thus begin 
the act of " feeding/ ' 

Another remarkable property also can be ob- 
served ; for a cell which thus grows by feeding need 
not remain as one individual, but may split into 
two, or into more than two, which may cohere for 
a time, but will ultimately separate and continue 
existence on their own account. Thus begins the 
act of " reproduction.' ' 

But a still more remarkable property can be ob- 
served in some of the cells, though not in all: they 
can not only assimilate a fragment of matter which 



1 68 Life and Matter 

comes into contact with them, but they can sense 
it, apparently, while not yet in contact, and can 
protrude portions of their substance or move their 
whole bodies towards the fragment, thus beginning 
the act of " hunting" ; and the incipient locomotory 
power can be extended till light and air and moist- 
ure and many other things can be sought and 
moved towards, until locomotion becomes so free 
that it sometimes seems apparently objectless — mere 
restlessness, change for the sake of change, like that 
of human beings. 

The power of locomotion is liable, however, to 
introduce the cell to new dangers, and to conditions 
hostile to its continued aggregate existence. So, 
in addition to the sense of food and other desirable 
things ahead, it seems to acquire, at any rate when 
still further aggregated and more developed, a sense 
of shrinking from and avoidance of the hostile and 
the dangerous, — a sense, as it were, of "pain." 

And so it enters on its long career of progress, 
always liable to disintegration or "death" ; it begins 
to differentiate portions of itself for the feeding 
process, other portions for the reproductive process, 
other portions, again, for sensory processes, but 



Origin and Nature of Life 169 

retaining the protective sense of pain almost every- 
where, until the spots sensitive to ethereal and 
aerial vibrations — which, arriving as they do from 
a distance, carry with them so much valuable infor- 
mation, and when duly appreciated render possible 
perception and prediction as to what is ahead — 
until these sensitive spots have become developed 
into the special organs which we now know as the 
"eye" and the "ear." Then, presently, the power 
of communication is slowly elaborated : speech and 
education begin, and the knowledge of the indi- 
vidual is no longer limited to his own experience, 
but expands till it embraces the past history and 
the condensed acquisition of the race. And thus 
gradually arises a developed self-consciousness, a 
discrimination between the self and the external 
world, and a realisation of the power of choice and 
freedom, — a stage beyond which we have not 
travelled as yet, but a stage at which almost all 
things seem possible. 

The first two properties, assimilation and repro- 
duction, overshadowed by the possibility of death, 
are properties of life of every kind, plant life as of 
all other. The power of locomotion and special 



170 Life and Matter 

senses, overshadowed by the sense ol pain, are the 
sign of a still further development into what we call 
" animal life." The further development of mind, 
consciousness, and sense of freedom, overshadowed 
by the possibility of wilful error or sin, is the con- 
spicuous attribute of life which is distinctively 
human. 

Thus, our complex molecular aggregate has 
shown itself capable of extraordinary and most 
interesting processes, has proved capable of con- 
stituting the material vehicle of life, the natural 
basis of living organisms, and even of mind ; very 
much as a planet of certain size proves capable of 
possessing an atmosphere. 

But is it to be supposed that the complex aggre- 
gate generated the life and mind, as the planet 
generated its atmosphere? That is the so-called 
materialistic view, but to the writer it seems an 
erroneous one, and it is certainly one that is not 
proven. It is not even certain that every planet 
generated all the gases of its own atmosphere : some 
of them it may have swept up in its excursion 
through space. What is certain is that it possesses 
the power of retaining an atmosphere : it is by no 



Origin and Nature of Life 171 

means so certain how all the constituents of that 
atmosphere arrived. 

Questions Concerning the Origin and Nature of Life 

All that we have actually experienced and verified 
is that a complex molecular aggregate is capable of 
being the vehicle or material basis of life; but to 
the question what life is we have as yet no answer. 
Many have been the attempts to generate life de 
novo, by packing together suitable materials and 
keeping them pleasantly warm for a long time ; but, 
where all germs of pre-existing life have rigorously 
been excluded, the attempt hitherto has been a fail- 
ure: so far, no life has made its appearance under 
observation, except from antecedent life. 

But, to exclude all trace of antecedent life it is 
necessary not only to shut out floating germs, but 
to kill all germs previously existing in the material 
with which we are dealing. This killing of previous 
life is usually accomplished by heat ; but it has been 
argued that strong heat will destroy not only the 
life but the potentiality for life ; will break up the 
complex aggregate on which life depends ; will de- 
prive the incubating solution not only of life but of 



172 Life and Matter 

livelihood. There is some force in the objection, 
and it is an illustration of the difficulty surrounding 
the subject. But Tyndall showed that antecedent 
life could be destroyed without any very high 
temperature, — by gentle heat periodically applied ; 
heat insufficient to kill the germs, but sufficient to 
kill the hatched or developed organisms. Periodic 
heating enables the germs of successive ages to 
hatch, so to speak, and the product to be slain; 
and, although some each time may have reproduced 
germs before slaughter — eggs capable of standing 
the warmth — yet a succession of such warmings 
would ultimately be fatal to all, and that without 
necessarily breaking up the protoplasmic complex 
aggregates on the existence of which the whole 
vital potentiality depends. 

So far, however, all effort at spontaneous genera- 
tion has been a failure; possibly because some 
essential ingredient or condition was omitted, pos- 
sibly because great lapse of time was necessary. 
But suppose it was successful; what then? We 
should then be reproducing in the laboratory a pro- 
cess that must at some past age have occurred on 
the earth; for at one time the earth was certainly 



Origin and Nature of Life 173 

hot and molten and inorganic, whereas now it 
swarms with life. 

Does that show that the earth generated the life? 
By no means ; no more than it does that the earth 
necessarily has generated all the gases of its atmos- 
phere, or the meteoric dust which lies upon its snows. 

Life may be something not only ultra-terrestrial, 
but even immaterial, something outside our present 
categories of matter and energy; as real as they 
are, but different, and utilising them for its own 
purpose. What is certain is that life possesses the 
power of vitalising the complex material aggregates 
which exist on this planet, and of utilising their 
energies for a time to display itself *amid terrestrial 
surroundings; and then it seems to disappear or 
evaporate whence it came. It is perpetually arriv- 
ing and perpetually disappearing. While it is here, 
if it is at a sufficiently high level, the animated 
material body moves about and strives after many 
objects, some worthy, some unworthy; it acquires 
thereby a certain individuality, a certain character. 
It may realise itself, moreover, becoming conscious 
of its own mental and spiritual existence; and it 
then begins to explore the Mind which, like its 



174 Life and Matter 

own, it conceives must underlie the material fabric 
— half displayed, half concealed, by the environ- 
ment, and intelligible only to a kindred spirit. 
Thus the scheme of law and order dimly dawns on 
the nascent soul, and it begins to form clear con- 
ceptions of truth, goodness, and beauty; it may 
achieve something of permanent value, as a work of 
art or of literature ; it may enter regions of emotion 
and may evolve ideas of the loftiest kind ; it may 
degrade itself below the beasts, or it may soar till 
it is almost divine. 

Is it the material molecular aggregate that has of 
its own unaided latent power generated this indi- 
viduality, acquired this character, felt these emo- 
tions, evolved these ideas? There are some who try 
to think that it is. There are others who recognise 
in this extraordinary development a contact between 
this material frame of things and a universe higher 
and other than anything known to our senses; a 
universe not dominated by physics and chemistry, 
but utilising the interactions of matter for its own 
purposes; a universe where the human spirit is 
more at home than it is among these temporary col- 
locations of atoms; a universe capable of infinite 



Origin and Nature of Life 175 

development, of noble contemplation, and of lofty 
joy, long after this planet — nay, the whole solar 
system — shall have fulfilled its present sphere of 
destiny, and retired cold and lifeless upon its 
endless way. 



" One of the classics of the nineteenth century." 



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A Popular Scientific Study 
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Translated from the Fifth (enlarged) Edition by 

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The most valuable production since Darwin's " Origin 
of Species." 

The Nature of Man 

Studies in Optimistic Philosophy 
By Elie Metchnikoff 

Professor at the Pasteur Institute 
Translated with an Introduction by 

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